Travis Perkins, the UK’s largest builder’s merchant, has announced 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.
The new platform 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 to design one plot as it is a multi-unit development site without needing any additional resource.
By ensuring detailed and accurate material pricing from the start, 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® also reduces development risk by allowing housebuilders to create a house type from over half a billion fully-coordinated, tried and tested designs, enabling developers to create costed construction drawings with accurate elevations, floorplans, specifications, cross sections and more, which would typically 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. 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.”
The first two homes built using the platform will be ready by September and are based in the Midlands, with extensive work has been carried out on pilot schemes across the country.
