Travis Perkins, the UK’s largest builders merchant and part of Travis Perkins plc, announces the launch of its WholeHouse platform, a first for the sector that means SME housebuilders can plan and design a bespoke digital model of a house before physically constructing it.
It ensures detailed and accurate design, plans and material pricing of developments from the first day. From start to finish, the process can be completed in under an hour, saving weeks of work.
Based on the BIM process, WholeHouse has been developed by Travis Perkins in partnership with industry leading experts, such as architects, engineers and planners as well as customers and suppliers. The portal is specifically designed for housebuilders building up to 250 units a year. It means they can bring plots and developments to life through 3D visualisation in designs that can be easily adapted, personalised and tailored depending on customer requirements.
The platform also offers scalability, so it’s just as easy for them to design one plot as it is a multi-unit development site without needing any additional resource.
Because it ensures detailed and accurate material pricing from the beginning, the platform promotes improved sustainability by reducing material waste and providing informed choices around low carbon solutions. This also leads to a reduction in development costs because of the accurate and real-time pricing the portal provides.
WholeHouse reduces development risk by allowing housebuilders to create a house type from over half a billion fully coordinated, tried and tested designs. This enables builders to create costed, construction drawings with accurate elevations, floor plans, specifications, cross sections and more at the click of a button. Traditionally many of these items would need to be manually costed from drawings and separate subcontractor quotes.
The platform collates and automatically processes all relevant information in one place and is fully compliant with the latest regulations and industry standards and works in real-time.
The platform can save weeks on design development. It means that in under an hour, WholeHouse can supply housebuilders with an entire set of drawing sheets, up to 200 pages of construction details and a full bill of all the items needed to build a property.
Lee Jackson, Director of WholeHouse said: “Being at the heart of construction, we take great pride in supporting our customers with new value added services that help them to navigate an increasingly complex construction landscape with new legislation and decarbonisation targets.
“WholeHouse will do just that, and help SME housebuilders, who are the lifeblood of regional property markets, to build better, more sustainable homes quickly and safely, whilst retaining control over the creative design elements and saving time and money.
“This portal has been a year in the making and is the culmination of 500 years of collaboration and industry experience. It puts the housebuilder in the driving seat and enables them to simplify the traditionally complex process of planning, costing and building new homes at the click of a button.”
WholeHouse benefits include:
- Saves housebuilders weeks on design development
- Reduces the development risk through fully coordinated, and tried and tested designs
- Provides scalability; from one plot to multi unit development sites with no additional resource requirements
- Streamlines builder and architect design process and reduces time spent
- Consistency and quality maintained throughout the design process
- Streamlines subcontractor quotes to give confidence and surety on price and specification
- Ensures detailed and accurate material pricing of developments from the beginning
- Designs checked and reviewed by industry leading and expert supplier panel and fully compliant with industry standards and latest regulations
- Ability to create a 3D visualisation of a house before it is physically constructed and improves accuracy in design and material schedules
- Highly complex information is embedded in the models, down to details like the colour of brickwork, different roof types, verge types, windows, door frames, porches, gutters and much more
- It means that drawings and renderings of a property, that would normally take days to create, can be done at the click of a button by the housebuilder
- Component prices update in real-time as different components are added to the design so informed costing decisions can be made
- The technology has the ability to zoom right in so you can view what the homeowner will experience
The first two homes built using the platform will be ready by September and are based in the Midlands. Extensive work has been carried out on pilot schemes across the country.
