Industry Trends
The United States is home to one of the world’s largest construction industries with over 1.29 billion in spending. Commercial Construction is expected to continue to grow and innovate new methods in 2023. Below is a look at five industry trends:
- Increase in Modular Design – A building is constructed offsite and then put together on-site. Modular construction typically involves creating at least 60-90% of a structure before bringing it to the construction site. The modular design process offers three advantages:
- By taking construction into controlled factory environments construction time is cut in half. This approach allows work to proceed simultaneously and requires no waiting for other trades to complete their work.
- A greener building process that reduces waste by allowing crews to recycle used materials and control inventory.
- Smarter design prioritizes cost-effective methods to create buildings quicker, safer, and cheaper.
- Upsurge in Green Building – Building operations and construction create nearly 40 percent of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. Industry business leaders are pursuing ways to minimize material waste resulting from demolitions, moving to eco-friendly building materials, and selecting locally sourced building products.
- Improved Design Technology – Building Information Modeling (BIM) is rapidly reimagining the construction design and production process. This design technology allows the user to create a virtual building model. In addition to improving building design and drafting efficiency, it saves every trade involved in the project time and money by virtually eliminating unforeseen issues or accidents.Virtual design and construction (VDC) describe the growing use of virtual environments to engineer and visualize the construction of structures before they’re built in the physical world. These virtual environments can be accessed via desktop, and mobile devices, along with augmented and virtual reality hardware. It’s estimated that reworks of faulty or incorrect builds account for nearly 30% of construction industry costs. The virtual design greatly reduces the need for reworks of incorrect builds by allowing builders to initially build structures in a virtual environment.
- Advanced Workforce Efficiency – Over the last eight years construction job openings have increased by 50 percent, but the number of new employees in the industry comprises just 14 percent of the workforce. As a result, construction companies must innovate to make up for the decreased number of workers. This is evident through high-tech equipment, automation, and smarter building innovations.
- Utilizing Drones – Using drones to measure stockpiles of building materials in real time has resulted in a 61% increase in measurement accuracy. Also, construction companies using drones can survey and inspect various locations without putting any actual humans in harm’s way.
- Mobile Construction Apps – New mobile technologies which began during the Pandemic are enabling crews to provide accurate photo documentation to clients, contractors, and inspectors, allowing some aspects of project completion to occur offsite.
New methodologies including modular design, minimizing waste, improved design technology, workforce efficiency, utilizing drones, and mobile apps will enable commercial construction companies to complete projects faster and cheaper than ever before in 2023.
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