Originally published on October 19, 2023, by Victor Whitman.
Mass timber has a bright future within commercial real estate development but there are special hurdles that developers and builders must learn about and overcome, according to commercial real estate experts at NAIOP’s CRE.Converge in Seattle.
Mass timber is an engineered wood product typically made of large panels or beams that are manufactured off-site. The products are engineered to bear weight like steel or concrete but are of lighter weight. Because it is lighter and prefabricated, it can cut down on construction times and also reduce labor costs. The product is also considered more environmentally friendly.
“We’re still in this growth stage where we’re figuring out what products are moving toward standardization, which will make the building system more mainstream,” said mass timber consultant Erica Spiritos, owner, Erica Spiritos LLC, moderator of the panel discussion. Panelists included Robert Gerard, PE, senior discipline engineer, Coffman Engineers of San Diego; Seattle developer and now consultant A-P Hurd, president, SkipStone; and Dean Lewis, director of mass timber and prefabrication, Skanska USA Building, Inc., in Seattle.
“We’re still at a point where we’re tracking every single mass timber project that’s being built, and hopefully at some point we’ll stop tracking because there are so many,” said Spiritos. That said, mass timber has come a long way, she said.