June 25, 2008

Halliday Homes adapts pre-engineered houses to Iceland’s climate

KORKY KOROLUK

correspondent

CARLETON PLACE

Sometimes, as any salesman knows, the hard work comes after the sale is made.

Sometimes it’s a simple matter of customer service. Sometimes, it’s a matter of adapting a product to meet local conditions.

That’s what happened to Halliday Homes, after a prospective dealer just dropped out of the World Wide Web and into the company’s lap. They had an eager customer in Iceland, but some adaptation was necessary.

Halliday is a manufacturer of pre-engineered, wood-frame, energy-efficient, panelized homes. And when someone in Iceland went searching on the Web, Halliday was one of the names that popped up.

So Halliday didn’t lift a finger to find the prospect. But a positive attitude was needed to close the deal, and some changes in their product were made to accommodate the tiny country’s special conditions.

“We were careful not to say, ‘Here’s what we do; take it or leave it’.” Halliday sales chief John Schelter recalled. “That’s not the way we do business.”

“Instead, we said, ‘Here’s what we do; help us make it better. Help us make it work in your market.”

That attitude resulted in agreement, and, in the last year and a half, Halliday has been selling a steady trickle of homes there.

It’s a tiny market, and it isn’t going to yield great riches for anyone. The capital city, Reykjavik, and its suburbs, has a population of roughly 200,000. The entire country has a population of just 304,000.

Still, Halliday finds it a satisfying market. First, though, there had to be some adaptations.

“Wind loading and fastening are critical areas in the design of homes for the Iceland market,” Schelter said in an interview.

Wind is a constant in Iceland, blowing from the west, from Greenland to Europe, “and it just happens to blow right through Iceland,” he said. “There are virtually no trees to slow it down, so wind is the big issue.”

It also rains a lot. And “it rains horizontally because of the wind.”

“We had to re-test the window selection we use to make sure it would meet or exceed the code over there. It did.”

Because of the wind, keeping the roof in place takes some planning. The practice has been “to run long bolts<0x2026>from the foundation right up to the (roof) trusses, and it would take them two to three weeks on site to assemble that fastening system.”

Halliday came up with a different system that takes about an hour and a half to install. That’s a huge labour savings, Schelter said, “important because there’s not much construction labour over there.”

The Halliday system involves putting an anchor in the concrete as the slab is poured. It comes out of the concrete “straight flush on the outside of the wall.”

“So we stand our wall panel there, then screw into that anchor from the outside, and that anchors the wall to the slab.

For the trusses, we use a hurricane-type tie. Typically you would use one tie on each side in Canada. Over there, we use two on each side.”

The first contact from Iceland was from a custom homebuilder. But when that didn’t work out, that homebuilder’s first customer for a Halliday home stepped up as a replacement. He’s not even a homebuilder himself, but was looking for a business opportunity.

So far, he, and Halliday, have sold “10 or 12 of what they call summer houses,” Schelter said. “They’re what we would call cottages, and they were all in the 750-square-foot range.”

Another eight or 10 were in a range of sizes, from a 1,200-square-foot bungalow, to a duplex of 2,400 square feet on each side.

There are few two-storey houses in Iceland, Schelter said. Typically, the houses are bungalows with low-slope roofs. Steep pitches aren’t necessary since there is little snow.

Some manufacturers of prefabricated housing rough in the electrical and mechanical components at the factory, but for the Icelandic market, Halliday doesn’t do that.

The electrical service there is 220 volts, so the dealer there has local trades install it. And heating is almost all geothermal, including hot water.

“Your hot water is delivered to your house, and metered, just like our cold water in Canada,” Schelter said. “It comes in pipes right from the street, 150 degrees hot.”

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