Column Marianne Loof | Magic Pill

The housing market in our region is booming and production capacity has been stretched to its absolute limits. It doesn’t help that during the crisis our sector has lost many experienced people and hence production capacity.

With the sudden growth of the market over the last years, we are now under pressure to quickly regain our strength, or even to come out stronger than before: fewer mistakes, higher quality, higher ambitions, circular and energy-neutral. Additionally inner-city densification on tricky locations like existing neighbourhoods and old industrial sites is the name of the game now.

Luckily, many valuable lessons from the crisis can actually be applied today: strategic designing, BIM-integrated visualization and rendering, lean process organization. Well, in theory at least, because the reality is that the sector is split in two types of innovation-thinking.

On the one side are those parties that have really changed their methods. Parties that do not just affirm the ‘better and faster’ credo of these times, but that have really invested in developing the expertise and materials to realize it. They have been prepared to take risk and reinvent themselves.

On the other side are parties that use empty phrases such as ‘BIM will make us faster!’, and think it is actually that simple; parties who think that ‘a VO+ is enough for the procurements or with getting a permit!’, only to get stuck in choosing the energy-concept, housing category or flexibility.

Indeed, it is possible today to deliver higher quality in less time. But that does require the combined strength of experience and expertise, focus, decision-making skill and mandate. Lacking these, catch-phrase claims are more likely to cause delays and higher costs than better results.

Maybe the situation is like with people who are trying to loose weight: the one understands and puts in the required effort, while the other thinks that some magic pill can do the trick just as well.

September 2017, Cobouw.nl