Beazer is backing homes manufacturing. Chief executive John Low is overseeing investment in industrial premises and techniques he believes will put the firm ahead of its rivals
"In nearly forty years in homebuilding, this is the most exciting project I have ever been involved in" says Beazer Group's chief executive, John Low, as he surveys the 40 000 ft2 of factory space he has leased in Ipswich.

Torwood2, as it has been christened, is still being fitted out but is already producing wall sections for Amphion. When Torwood2 is fully operational it will produce at least 2000 timber frame units a year. Eventually Beazer will shift the majority of its homebuilding output over to factory-built modules and will be manufacturing for the Amphion Consortium and other homebuilders as well.

"We've already been approached by three smaller housebuilders," says Low. "They share our vision that this is the future but they are not big enough to make such a large investment." Beazer is allocating between £1m and £2m to Torwood2 and has plans in hand for a third plant as well.

Beazer started down this road in 1993 when it purchased Torwood, a timber frame manufacturer in Livingston near Edinburgh. Scotland is the heartland of UK timber frame, accounting for around 60% of the total output in 1999.

The original factory produces around 1500 homes a year, most of which are used to build out Beazer's Scottish sites. However the original plant, in common with most UK timber frame suppliers, is largely unmechanised, the frames and panels being assembled manually on jigged tables.

The plan for Torwood2 is to build a plant which is far more automated, using techniques and machinery imported from Scandinavia. Beazer has even hired a Swede, Ants Suurkuusk, to supervise the implementation of the new systems in Ipswich. He comments "In Sweden, this is the way the vast majority of homes are built. We've been practising prefabrication since 1927 and it is all second nature to us now."

As per the Swedish model, output from Torwood2 will consist of closed panel walls and floor cassettes, ready to be craned into place.

Beazer has christened the system Tee-U-Tec and has already built a demonstration house using the system, at the Gas Research and Technology Centre in Loughborough.

Although it might seem a small step to switch from on-site manual construction to partial prefabrication, it represents a sea change for UK homebuilding - if only because Beazer Group is both homebuilder and manufacturer - what economists would call vertically integrated. And if Torwood starts selling significant volumes of its output to other homebuilders, Beazer should start seeing a positive impact on margins.

John Low says: "The benefit to our bottom line will take 18 months or so to come through. The immediate benefits will come in time savings, quality and production efficiencies.

"Torwood is and will be just as important as each of our other divisions. It has excellent growth potential both to cater for our own needs and the external market. Beazer Homes builds around 6000 units per annum; already some 30% of this is timber frame and going forward we see this proportion lifting rapidly to around 70%."

While some commentators have called into question whether a wholesale switch to timber frame is a viable option in the near term, Beazer are out to prove not only that it is but also that it can be profitable.

One major downside of the prefabricated approach is that the delivery of the finished product can be problematic. The size of the panels will be restricted to what a lorry can carry, manoeuvrability is limited and craning off becomes a major consideration.

While demonstration projects show that superstructures of prefabricated houses can be built in a matter of hours, it has yet to be shown that this is a sensible or economic way for UK speculative homebuilders to go about their business.

Beazer, in common with Westbury and Wilcon who are pursuing similar strategies, obviously thinks it is. Once Beazer has all three of its Torwood factories on-line it should be capable of producing more than 6000 timber frame units a year.

The next few years will show whether Beazer has achieved an advantage over the competition by pursuing the Egan agenda with timber frame.

How Beazer won the Amphion bid

Beazer won the Amphion contract as a result of a lengthy and exacting bid process. The Amphion Consortium produced a 23-page bid document which sought to examine every aspect of the business plans being submitted; not just the construction technology but also the procurement systems and the sustainability of the plan. Beazer won out over the competition because it showed the commitment to go into production with a new factory in Ipswich, close to the areas where Amphion anticipates building. Torwood2 is located in Ipswich Docks in a warehouse leased from Anglo Norden, a timber importer whose product it is intended to use. So not only does this reduce handling and transportation to a minimum but it enables Torwood to work on just-in-time principles. Beazer was also able to bring some of its Section 106 land to the table which will facilitate Amphion’s plans. Beazer is required to build superstructures with maximum U values far lower than those set by the proposed Part L changes and each house must meet certain pre-defined standards such as Secure By Design and Lifetime Homes. In return, Amphion is promising Beazer orders for 2000 homes over the next four years. The sheer size of this order was the catalyst for Beazer to go ahead with its plans to build Torwood 2 and switch more of its own build to timber frame.

What makes a Tee-U-Tec home?

The end product from Beazer’s Torwood2 plant is going to be far more elaborate than the British have come to understand as timber frame. Whereas traditional timber frame plants have supplied open panels which are insulated, cabled, piped and boarded on site, Torwood will be producing closed panels and cassettes, where all these first fix trades will be done in the factory. It is somewhat similar to Fillcrete’s Tradis panels which have been in production since 1998 and like Fillcrete, Beazer has seen fit to brand its system - its name is Tee-U-Tec, short for total energy efficiency upgrading technology. The first Tee-U-Tec wall panels are already rolling off Torwood2’s Ipswich production line though as yet the lines are still manually operated. The specification for the Amphion homes is a 140 mm thick wall filled with mineral wool, a 15 mm OSB board fixed on the inside face and a 6.4 mm Paneline medium density fibreboard fixed to the outer face. No breather paper, no vapour barrier. Though they hesitate to call it a “breathing wall”, aficionados of timber frame will instantly recognise it as something very similar, though the more correct term for this type of structure is a reverse wall, because the OSB racking board is on the inside face. In fact the adhesives contained in OSB will tend to act as a vapour barrier. The Amphion walls are being put together using a modified balloon frame system. Whereas a platform frame places the first floor joists on top of the wall plates, the balloon frame hangs the floors off the walls, using a steel angle for support. This makes it easier to achieve good air tightness within the structure. Joinery will be factory fitted. John Low, Beazer chief executive, says: “Go back 10 years and the window was a component which was delivered to site, built in and then glazed and painted. Then we started to see factory-made windows but they still needed to be delivered, in our case, to around 200 individual sites. Torwood is the logical third stage: the window is now built into the wall before being transported to site. Now the window manufacturer need only deliver to two or three locations.”

Source

Building Homes