Brandon Searle runs UNB's Off-site Construction Research Centre in Fredericton — the applied-research shop that sits between a contractor's curiosity about prefab and an actual modular project. In 51 minutes he maps the real cost curve, the hidden financial traps, and the government money most small contractors have never heard of.
A Marriott hotel that was going to take two years was delivered in 15 months. Nine months of room revenue — collected early, not deferred. That is the modular pitch in a single sentence, stripped of the trade-show gloss. It is also the number Brandon Searle keeps coming back to when contractors ask him whether off-site construction is actually worth the learning curve.
Searle is the Innovation Director at the University of New Brunswick Off-site Construction Research Centre — OCRC for short — a Fredericton applied-research shop founded with OSCO Construction Group as its founding strategic partner. When Searle joined in May 2019 the centre had two staff. By the time this conversation aired in August 2021 it had grown to six staff and 19 researchers, running more than 15 active industry projects. His route there: a civil engineering degree from UNB, road construction work, a stint at Opus International Consultants — now part of WSP Global — and then a pivot into the innovation side of an industry he'd been working in since he was a kid.
He is also, by that point, the first Atlantic Canadian representative on the CanBIM board and a member of the Modular Building Institute's Canadian Council. He does not talk like a promoter. He talks like someone who has spent two years watching contractors make the same expensive first mistakes with prefab and would prefer they stop.
Don't mistake schedule savings for cost savings
The most useful thing Searle says about modular construction is also the most counterintuitive: "i don't necessarily think it's always cheaper" The competitive advantage is schedule compression, and schedule compression is only worth money if you price it correctly before you commit.
The Marriott example is the proof: "having a hotel done that was traditionally going to take two years they had that done in 15 months" A hotel that opens nine months early is earning room revenue for nine months that a traditional-build competitor is not. For a commercial hospitality owner, that is the analysis. The construction cost per module might be higher; the total project return is not.
For residential or institutional projects where the owner does not capture revenue on occupancy, the calculus changes. Searle does not pretend otherwise. What he asks contractors to do is run the right math for the right project type — not apply a blanket off-site premium or discount before they understand what they are actually buying.
The first two projects are tuition, not savings
If you are a general contractor entertaining your first modular project, Searle wants you to go in with a clear head: "the first three are going to be a learning experience right because it's just a different way of managing" This is not a warning to stay away. It is a budget line. Factor the learning curve into project financing the way you would factor the cost of new equipment: you are acquiring a capability, and capability has a price.
The factory model also requires a different workforce culture. In a traditional site, each trade stays in its silo. In a modular plant, the assembly-line logic demands cross-training: "you'd be trained to put your drywall up you'd also be trained to run all the electrical lines" That is not a skills adjustment. It is a hiring and training philosophy, and for Atlantic Canadian contractors still competing for tradespeople in a tight labour market, it is worth thinking through before the first module is ordered.
The upside of that same factory model, one Searle thinks is systematically underquantified: predictable shift work means stable home lives for workers. "if you're in a manufacturing plant where you have shift work you have regular work how that impacts the rest of your" — the sentence trails off into the obvious. Mental health, family stability, retention. If you are trying to keep tradespeople in a region where they have other options, that is a recruitment argument the industry has not yet learned to make.
Read the deposit clause before you sign
The financial risk that Searle flags most explicitly is not the learning curve — it is the upfront exposure. Modular manufacturers typically require a 50% deposit when the order is placed. For a GC managing project cash flow, that is a significant number sitting out of pocket before a single module arrives on site. And the bonding protection that would normally backstop that exposure is, as of this episode, still underdeveloped in the Canadian off-site sector: "there's a risk to the gc of over you know a 50 down payment essentially for the modules"
This is not a reason to avoid modular. It is a reason to read the contract, price the financing cost, and have a frank conversation with your lender before the deposit is due. Atlantic Canadian GCs who have moved into hybrid business models — a traditional contracting arm running alongside a modular manufacturing operation — have one structural hedge against this exposure: they are effectively their own manufacturer. That hybrid model is already happening in the region, Searle notes, and it makes sense for firms that want to balance volume across both delivery methods without being hostage to either.
Use a university lab to avoid a $20,000 mistake
OCRC is not only a research shop. It is a low-stakes test environment for technology that would otherwise require a bet-the-budget hardware purchase. Contractors curious about AR/VR on the job site face a hard first question: the hardware and licences alone can run "you know 20 30 grand" before a single worker has put on a headset. Most small and mid-size firms are not going to absorb that for a technology they have not validated.
OCRC runs as a test bed precisely for that situation. A contractor can work through the OCRC to trial the technology on a real project, generate real operational data, and make the purchase decision from evidence rather than a vendor demo. The same logic applies to any emerging construction technology where the upfront cost of being wrong is higher than a firm can comfortably absorb. The lab exists to de-risk the experiment.
OCRC's building-envelope research facility — a 30-by-14-foot test chamber designed for structural, air-pressure, and impact testing — is built for the local material conditions that matter specifically to Atlantic Canada. Searle makes a point that is easy to miss: Atlantic Canada's freeze-thaw cycling is not the same as northern Canada's stable cold. "we go from in january we'll have like a random 12 degree day and then we're back down to minus 20" The stress that kind of cycling puts on building materials is distinct, and local testing is not a second-tier approximation of national standards — it may be the more demanding test.
The funding most small contractors have never claimed
OCRC's industry partnerships are funded through a stack of federal and provincial programs, and Searle's walk through them is the most practically useful five minutes in the episode for any Atlantic Canadian contractor under 500 employees.
The standout is NRC IRAP. The National Research Council's Industrial Research Assistance Program designates certain university research groups — OCRC is one — and then provides cost-shared access for qualifying firms: "they budget some of the or they have some funding to bring industry companies under 500 employees to us to do research for them at no cost" The research is not free in an absolute sense — IRAP funds the cost-sharing — but to the company the access is effectively free. Most small contractors do not know this mechanism exists.
Beyond IRAP, the stack includes NBIF (New Brunswick Innovation Foundation), ACOA (Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency), ENCIR/CIRC Alliance grants, and Mitacs. Each program has different eligibility rules and different timelines; the OCRC team helps industry partners identify and apply for the right combination. If you are a New Brunswick contractor with a construction technology question you have been putting off because you cannot justify the research budget, the conversation starts at unb.ca/ocrc.
What the UK BIM mandate got wrong — and what Atlantic Canada should learn from it
OCRC's four research themes — digital technology implementation, constructability and testing, lean construction, and industry-driven research — put BIM adoption at the centre of the digital work. Searle points to the UK government's 2016 mandate of BIM Level 2 for all centrally procured government projects as the cautionary reference. Large firms had the resources to build BIM capability ahead of the mandate. Smaller companies did not: "the smaller companies struggled and they saw it as this black box that they didn't know where to start" Any Atlantic Canadian policy push toward BIM adoption that does not include SME capacity-building will produce the same result — a competitive gap in favour of the firms that are already large enough to absorb the transition cost.
The MEP-in-precast work OCRC is doing points toward where that capacity-building ultimately leads. Embedding mechanical, electrical, and plumbing into precast concrete panels at the factory eliminates the on-site connection bottleneck that eats schedule gains from prefab. "what if we could move some of our trades inside the factory" — the logic is simple; the execution requires the design coordination, the BIM discipline, and the manufacturing relationship that most Atlantic Canadian GCs do not yet have. OCRC is building the research base that makes it achievable.
The work that is already happening here
Two Atlantic Canadian projects illustrate what the regional industry has already pulled off. The Amsterdam Inn and Suites in Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick — a 78-suite hotel with a conference centre and restaurant — was built with a hybrid structure: conventional construction at ground level, modular modules on floors two through four. The project pulled on a Sussex-based manufacturer and demonstrated that the supply chain for this kind of work can exist inside the province.
For the Nunavut affordable housing project, OCRC ran supply-chain simulation and material testing at minus 65 degrees Celsius. The logistics of getting modular housing to a northern community are categorically different from a hotel in Florenceville; the research that makes it viable is not glamorous work, but it is the work the industry needs done.
Searle closes with the partnerships OCRC has built — Dalhousie, the University of Wolverhampton in the UK, a summer exchange cohort — because the research questions Atlantic Canada faces are not unique to Atlantic Canada. The region benefits from the answers other markets have already worked out, and it has real-world conditions — the freeze-thaw cycling, the supply-chain distances, the SME-dominated contractor base — that make its own research contributions worth sharing back.
Guest: Brandon Searle, Innovation Director, UNB Off-site Construction Research Centre. Episode 15 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast, published August 2, 2021. Watch the full episode. Also featured: OSCO Construction Group — founding strategic partner of UNB OCRC, a vertically integrated group spanning precast concrete, structural steel, ready-mix, and construction management across Canada and the eastern United States; and WSP Global — one of the world's largest multidisciplinary engineering consultancies, where Searle worked prior to joining OCRC. Sources: NRC IRAP eligibility and program details; UK BIM Level 2 mandate.