Please turn your device to portrait.
GS E&C Expands into single-family home market with XiGEIST’s modular housing.
In South Korea, people identify as aspirational when buying items, the wealthy would buy. This includes luxury bags, but also expensive apartments, and where possible, houses.
As most South Koreans live in apartment complexes — 58 percent of Seoulites and 51.1 percent nationwide as of 2020 — any company, given the high cost of land, that enters the detached housing market needs to ensure its product is premium.
Korea’s GS E&C have launched their premium modular housing division, XiGEIST. GS E&C is a global entity that spans civil engineering, building, oil & gas, power plants and renewable energy, and also entered the Australian market in 2016 as part of the Spark consortium for Victoria’s road transport project, North East Link in June 2021.
They already own high-end apartment brand, Xi, and they’re not new to the modular housing market, with acquisitions of some significant modular home companies in Poland, Britain and USA in recent years.
A shortage of construction workers in South Korea was also a consideration in their commitment to launching their modular housing initiative.
See one of their ‘sample houses’
The choice of name for their modular housing brand follows the cultural ‘desirability’ of compounding in English, French, or in this case, a German word to the product.
In this case “Xi” is the established apartment brand and they’ve added a part-German word “Zeitgeist”.
Their modular homes will be manufactured at the company’s recently opened automated panelised prefabrication plant in South Korea, where they hope to achieve a 30% reduction in construction time, with a delivery timeline of eight weeks.
The term “factory-built housing”, to many South Koreans, evokes the image associated with boxy, cheap, temporary and short-lived buildings, an image that GS E&C aims to alter.
The company’s products target both developer clients and home buyers, and they have built two ‘sample houses’ near Seoul and Busan to demonstrate its modular housing offering.
Huh Yoon-hong, CEO of GS E&C’s new business division, said, “XiGEIST’s eco-friendly prefabricated wooden houses can provide opportunities to create new business for developers of complex-type detached houses, and deliver the value of a differentiated detached house lifestyle to customers, thereby contributing to the development of domestic housing culture. We expect it to lead a new paradigm.”
They’ve also introduced a “Small Housing ADU (Attachable Dwelling Unit)” that, according to company sources, can be recycled, and where customers can design their homes by combining standard modules.
