Why do the Swedes build so many more of their homes in factories than everyone else? It’s a great question, but according to U.S. modular housing expert Gary Fleisher, the premise is fundamentally flawed.
And whilst Sweden is widely reported to build up to 85% of its housing using modular or factory‑built systems, a figure that could be much higher once components are included, the United States sits at just 3%. Fleisher believes that the number could eventually rise to 15% and 25% once the market finally accepts that housing is an industrial product. “That would be transformational,” he said. “Not Swedish‑level, but meaningful, profitable, and scalable.”
But Sweden didn’t simply choose to “do modular better,” Fleisher argues. Instead, it succeeded because it spent decades reorganising housing as an industrial product, a shift driven by a national housing emergency, sky‑high labour costs, and harsh weather, and then reinforcing that industrialisation until it became the status quo.
“If you want to understand Sweden’s success, follow the trees,” Fleisher said, noting that the Swedes invested heavily in engineered wood systems and precision manufacturing long before most U.S. builders had even heard the term “panelization.”
Most of Sweden’s factory‑built housing falls under a broader category of industrialised construction. “That includes closed wall panels, floor and roof cassettes, volumetric modules and highly standardised timber systems,” he said. In Sweden, “factory‑built doesn’t mean one thing. It means anything that can be produced indoors, repeatedly, with predictable outcomes.”
Today, Wood Central spoke with Andrew Dunn, CEO of the Timber Development Association, who is part of the Future Framing Initiative, a project using a new concept known as “elemental prefabrication” to truly modernise Australia’s 350‑plus frame‑and‑truss supply chain.
As it stands, the Urban Land Institute of Australia reports that modular and prefabrication account for about 8% of the country’s industry, a figure Dunn said greatly underrepresents the frame-and-truss market. “We have one major point of difference over the United States: most wood‑framed houses in Australia are already industrialised, and it’s called frames and trusses,” he said, adding that up to 85% of house frames are already using modern methods of construction. “The question for Australia is whether we are already at the right point of industrialisation for houses, or whether we can add more activity to the factory.”
And there is no better place to study how to do it well than Sweden. Later this year, Dunn will join Wood Central’s Jason Ross in co‑hosting a study tour to examine how the world’s most advanced timber systems could be adapted to Australian conditions. “What we really want to tackle is this concept of ‘industrialised timber construction’ and how it can short‑circuit the major roadblocks to construction,” Dunn said. “We want to learn from the best overseas and create a model that is fit for purpose for Australia and our building standards.”
Fit‑for‑purpose thinking is critical. Last year, Wood Central reported that Australia would fail to scale up prefab unless it developed building systems suited to local conditions. Mathew Aitchison, CEO of the Commonwealth‑supported Building 4.0 CRC, warned that if Australia simply copied and pasted a model from overseas, it would be destined to fail.
“We’ve got an immense amount to learn from other countries,” he said, citing Sweden, Japan, and the United States as examples. “We don’t have those capabilities in Australia in that form. So, we can learn a lot from them, but we have to be very measured in how we apply them. All I’m saying is to the very many people that I meet who say, ‘Let’s just do what Sweden is doing.’ Pump the brakes a little bit on that.”
