I'm not aware of that innovation, and I would be very interested to get more information on that.
The question around premanufacture versus stick-build on site is not a new kind of question in housing delivery in the north. Going right back to the 1970s, they were prefabbing panels for social housing delivery across the north, as well as potential partial modules. There's no question that prefabrication occurring in a southern jurisdiction—in terms of the controlled environment, time, energy, and waste materials—should be more efficient. From a cost perspective alone, at that point in the process it should be more cost-effective as well. The issue really is the logistics. Once again, you have to get those larger pieces up to a northern jurisdiction.
In our jurisdiction, the only way is by boat, because if you fly anything, you increase the costs even further. If you send them up by boat, the boat costs are all based on volume and weight, but sometimes something that doesn't even weigh a lot costs a lot because of its volume and the space it takes up. I've seen in the past a lot of the balance between premanufactured components and components that are site-built. At the end of the day, their costs tend to be fairly comparable, because the efficiencies of the premanufacture get lost in the logistical cost of moving to sites. Having said that, the capacity part—both in terms of what these products are and the ease of maintenance, alteration, renovation, and upgrade—is part of that question as well.
We are open, of course, to both delivery methods. We actually have an RFP out right now. The evaluation process isn't complete, so I can't really go through the details of it, but in general we've asked for a social housing build of a number of fiveplex units in a couple of communities. It's design-build, and we've asked the proponents to propose whatever delivery method they want. Whether they want to do it modular, prefab panelling, or stick-build, we leave it up to them, but they have to work within the performance specs that we gave. We want total delivery, therefore they have to work out the logistical costs. That's going to be a very interesting result in terms of RFP compared to our standard stick-build process, so we can use that as a comparator of what kind of solution gets proposed versus what we've been working.