The construction company of the founders of Privalia, 011h, plans to inaugurate its first building of industrialized or assembled homes in 2022. It will be a block of sustainable homes at Joan Maragall street number 15 in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, in alliance with Renta Corporación. The works, which began in June of this year, are expected to finish between January and February of next year. In 2022, the company also plans to start two new multi-family housing projects: one in Arenys de Mar and the other in Raval (Barcelona). In the next three years, the goal is to build 1,300 industrialized apartments.
Regarding these new constructions, 011h has not yet provided more information, but it has explained details about the L'Hospitalet development, a new residential building with 8 homes ranging from 54 m² to 86 m². Most of the apartments have two bedrooms and one bathroom, except for those on the ground floor, which have three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The sale price will range between 190,000 euros and 280,000 euros. For now, they already have two reservations.
The building is mainly made of CLT (cross-laminated timber) wood from European forests. Thanks to the use of this type of material, CO₂ emissions derived from traditional construction will be reduced by 70% to 80%. The reduction includes both emissions resulting from the construction work and those produced by the building's maintenance. "We want our homes to be associated with concepts that benefit people's lives, such as sustainability and quality," explains 011h co-founder, José Manuel Villanueva.
The apartment block Life Habitat, as it has been named, will be a smart building both for the features it offers ---it is equipped with sensors that detect any technical problem and monitor energy consumption--- and for the way it has been built.
The Catalan startup is characterized by working in an industrialized and digitized way. Industrialized because most of the elements that make up the apartments are made in the factory and when they arrive at the construction site, they only need to be assembled, which reduces the completion time by 40% and reduces the number of professionals needed to 3 or 4 operators.
And digitized because a precise control of the entire process is carried out. For those parts that are assembled in the factory, technicians scan a QR code that tells them all the steps they have to follow to assemble them and calculates the time it takes them to finish them. If there is any incident, they use Ophelia: a robot that works with artificial intelligence and stores the cause of the problem in its database, helps them find possible solutions, and calculates how long it took to remedy it. In the case of assembling parts on site, instead of a QR, there is a person dedicated to data collection. "We have everything controlled, from the nails we need to why there has been a delay in the work. That is our added value," explains Ferran Urgellés, Head of Industrialization and Construction at 011h.
In December 2020, 011h raised 10 million euros from two European venture capital funds specialized in real estate technology (proptech) to start operating. Today, they have a team of 40 people, most of them architects.