6th Berlin Real Estate Talk

Affordable Housing - How doas it work?

Anja Marx, managing director of System im Bau since 2015 and WerkModul since 2019. Both companies that are dedicated to modular construction. In the construction industry, she is particularly interested in optimizing processes and creating new opportunities. Serial building is an important approach. Always combined with classic methods. Sustainable and adapted to the environment.

Summary of the interview:

What exactly is modular construction?

There are different variants of modular construction. The one we represent is on the one hand the classic 3D steel skeleton construction, like the Empire State Building was built in New York or the Borsig Tower in Berlin. And that means that we build with individual modules, where entire rooms are prefabricated. Basically, it's serial building.

What are the limits of steel construction?

Thanks to our 3D construction method, in which we prefabricate entire rooms, we can build very high, for example, our partner is currently building a 15-story building in Denmark. The limits here are the spans. We cannot build a huge loft, we will not build a room of 150m2 and we will not be able to build ceiling heights of 4-5 meters.

The advantages of modular construction

The biggest advantage is the time factor. Exceeding the planned construction time, which is common in many larger construction projects, does not exist in our company. We generally have a very short construction time. Moreover, in addition to the time savings, we also have financial savings and a qualitative advantage, which is made possible by prefabrication.

Duration of the construction period

In Berlin, as an example, we have a construction project with 300 micro-apartments, for which we need about 10 to 11 months. Prefabrication means that many things can happen at the same time. In the time it takes to prepare the land and the ground, the apartments, i.e. the modules, are already being built. Roughly speaking, we have about half the construction time of building projects in other construction methods.

Cost advantages of modular construction

First of all, due to the aforementioned time savings, we also save costs at the same time. In addition, we have a better possibility to plan costs, because at the beginning of the project we make a complete list of materials and buy exactly what is needed.