Bringing home building inside

According to some housing affordability advocates, the solution to soaring construction costs will involve buildings pieced together from preassembled room-sized modules that are winched into place and then fitted together like building blocks.

But Ottawa home builder Frank Cairo, co-founder and CEO of the Caivan Group, has another analogy that he’s looking to bring to fruition in a new 100,000-square-foot assembly plant the firm has built outside the city: “What we’re manufacturing,” he says, “is actually set up to be installed in a way that you’d install an IKEA cabinet: simple layouts, things are well labelled and when they arrive on-site, you don’t need to have a whole bunch of experience.”