Multiple North Bay modular construction projects underway on hotels, housing, classrooms in 2019
The North Bay made a big entry into the world of permanent modular construction this summer, as the three, four- and five-story hotels rose like stacked blocks in a process that can shave nearly a year off a build.
It’s part of a national trend where developers are turning to manufacturers to help with soaring construction labor costs and lengthening project-approval times.
Crews started digging up a parking lot between Davis Street and Highway 101 in Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square district in January for an AC Hotel location, one of Marriott International’s new upscale lifestyle brands. But over 12 hours by heavy truck and a few states away, the 142 guest rooms for that hotel rolled off construction lines in Guerdon Modular’s sprawling Boise, Idaho, factory, beginning in the fall of 2018.
Elsewhere in Boise, Prefab Logic produced 100 rooms in 60 modules for one of Marriott’s Farifield Inn & Suites locations, delivered to a nearly 2-acre site at 405 Martin Ave. in Rohnert Park. The company also had helped Factory_OS set up its 267,000-square-foot factory on Vallejo’s Mare Island, which nearly a year ago started turning out some of the 1,000-plus modules Google ordered for employee housing.
At the 35-acre Riverfront mixed-use development in southwest Petaluma, workers in September broke ground on a four-story, 122-room Courtyard Marriott hotel. It should be complete in about a year, builder Glacier House told the Argus-Courier. The hotel will be built with prefabricated modular rooms. Workers in Idaho will assemble the rooms and ship them to Petaluma in containers, where they will be stacked like building blocks.
This construction technique, which is gaining popularity, saves money on labor, which is already in short supply locally as construction crews rebuild from the North Bay fires.
Another time-saver at a construction site with modular construction is local inspections. Because of the volume of work coming out of Boise, California has positioned building inspectors there to stamp approved modules bound for the Golden State. That leaves less for local inspectors to have to check before granting the certificate of occupancy.
Because the modules arrive fully finished and furnished, the next three to four months after will be spent largely on exterior, hallway and common area finishes, according to construction companies erecting the local projects. Side benefits from such modular construction are more consistent construction quality, better soundproofing and less jobsite waste, they said.
Other North Bay builders, designers and manufacturers of modular construction include Mare Island startup iMod Structures and Santa Rosa-based firms JL Modular and HybridCore Homes.
The modular initiative was announced by Maryland-based Marriott in May 2017 after several years of study. Key reasons were external pressures on projects: extended development times through overloaded local planning departments and big jumps in labor costs.
Marriott’s move toward 10% modular construction is part of a boom in such construction for the hospitality industry, according to the Virginia-based Modular Building Institute, as opposed to modular relocatables often used for classrooms and homes. New York, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, California and Washington accounted for 83% of modular hotel rooms added.
The institute said the hospitality industry is the fastest growing market for modular builds, with 31.3% annual unit growth, to 1,989 rooms in 2017. Growth is expected to remain strong as several other national hotel brands are in talks with key modular builders, the report said.
