A study from the Berkeley Terner Center on roughly 800 prefabricated housing units suggests that offsite construction could lend more housing at cheaper prices if it could be brought to scale:
The Case for Off-site Multifamily Construction
While a number of other countries such as Sweden have already broadly integrated off-site construction, only a few off-site factories are currently in operation in the United States. Today, the Terner Center is releasing a new paper exploring the benefits, barriers, and breakthroughs needed to significantly expand this construction method in the American market, particularly in the multifamily development sector. The paper documents the potential cost savings, time savings and other benefits of off-site construction, identifies some of the key reasons it hasn’t yet taken off, and puts forth several ideas for how to overcome these challenges to bring it to scale.