More Than Just a Roof Over Your Head

The multi-family construction segment includes a wide variety of residences including apartments, college dormitories, row housing, mid-rise and high-rise buildings, and low-income to luxury units. Additionally, with the rise in baby-boomers downsizing and the aging population, senior-living residences are gaining in popularity with the expectations for a high quality of life. Housing options include communities for active lifestyles, independent living facilities, assisted living, long-term care, and special needs for dementia and continuing care.

CRH provides off-the-shelf and custom solutions for every aspect of multi-family projects. Our experts can fully integrate with your design team during upfront design, engineering, specifications development, and preconstruction. By working together early, we can answer questions regarding how product selection will affect constructability and recommend products that best meet your project’s goals.

With construction labor in short-supply, we understand the importance of construction speed and looking at alternative construction methods so your project can open on time. We have worked with numerous developers offering time-saving solutions in addition to the latest products.

We know construction costs are always top-of-mind – from the owner to each subcontractor. By providing pricing guidance for selected products during the budgeting phase, we help you mitigate unexpected cost estimates once the project reaches the bidding phase.

Maximizing Footprint and Building a Strong Foundation

During the project planning phase, it’s crucial to consider plans for site development, stormwater management, utility requirements, and the effect of a structure on its surroundings. When sites are small and land is scarce, developers and architects must also consider how to maximize the footprint.

We can help you explore a wider range of possibilities in your site design that otherwise would not be possible by thoughtfully planning underground utility and water storage options. By moving these functions underground, you eliminate the need for exposed retention or detention ponds and can accommodate a larger building footprint, a separate garage, outdoor recreational facilities or additional parking.

Our complete line of product solutions from Oldcastle Infrastructure, A CRH Company, and CRH Americas Materials will not only help you meet the intended environmental requirements, but also help increase the economic value of the lot.

Proper site planning and development can save significant time and money. From aggregates and stormwater management systems to concrete pipe and power, utility, and communication equipment structures, CRH can supply and custom engineer products that work together as an integrated system, helping you with efficiency and future lifecycle costs.

And, with our thousands of facilities across North America, we can often leverage our network of quarries, paving equipment, and more to develop sites in record time, saving the owner and contractor time and money. By working together early, we can recommend creative solutions that will benefit everyone from design to construction.

Creating a Comfortable Living Environment

From energy-efficient architectural glass and metal to masonry and windows, we can help you create the most aesthetically-pleasing and comfortable living spaces. Even with the right design, multi-family projects can face a host of challenges during construction.

CRH companies Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope® and Oldcastle APG have extensive experience working with leading architects, building owners and developers, general contractors, masonry and glazing contractors and building envelope consultants during the earliest stages of a project’s design.

Schedule delays due to weather and lead times, along with varying costs and material availability, can increase your risk when constructing a multi-family development. Having your apartment or condo opening date get pushed back means lost revenue from tenants. CRH businesses offer integrated building envelope systems where all the elements are engineered to work together seamlessly. This will create a more cohesive design and efficient construction process, resulting in less risk and fewer delays.

Engaging with the product manufacturer while planning and designing can help make sure all parties are in alignment about product design, availability, lead time, and specifications. Plus, you can benefit from R&D and the latest innovative envelope solutions.

Minimizing Construction Issues Through Prefabrication

When it comes to interiors, bathrooms are often the most problematic room in multi-unit construction. Pre-fabricated bathrooms can save time and money and relieve quality issues from having several trades on site building bathrooms.

CRH uses the latest BIM and lean manufacturing technologies to work with you from design to installation of bathrooms. Doing so can produce custom, consistent, and ready to install pre-fabricated bathrooms for hospitals, hotels, and multi-family residential projects. By selecting modular bathrooms from Oldcastle SurePods™ you can see a significant reduction in construction schedules, allowing you to open sooner and begin generating revenue more quickly.

Curb Appeal

Curb appeal sets your building apart and makes it a more desirable residence for potential tenants. Beyond designing a beautiful residence people want to call home, outdoor spaces are just as important for creating livable environments where people can create an indoor-outdoor living connection.

Segmental retaining walls and hardscapes can help define areas and create the perfect outdoor getaway for your occupants, and pavers can make a driveway or entry plaza look luxurious. If you’re building in an area that’s already developed, you’ll want to complement existing structures and surroundings. CRH can work with designers early on to create custom colors for the neighborhood or a specific texture to simulate the look of historic clay brick.

Beyond pavers and retaining walls, there are other exterior necessities you’ll need to put the finishing touches on your development, including asphalt for your parking lot, landscape aggregates, and mulch and decorative rocks for your landscaping.

By considering all these elements from the start of a project, you’ll create a more cohesive design and desirable living environment. CRH experts can work with you on all elements of a project as you begin designing so you can maximize budget and develop creative solutions to minimize construction challenges.

Reliability and trust are key for homeowners when selecting a developer to design and build their single-family home. Homeownership is a major investment and source of pride for families. From the home builder's perspective, though, factors such as delays, costs, and labor can make or break a project.

• Delays: Creating a detailed schedule from the start is imperative. Be realistic about allowances for weather, holidays, and your workforce, and stick to the schedule as you do the sitework, lot/pad prep, permits, framing, etc. Keep tabs on product availability including lead times and any custom-designed products your future homeowners might request. Additionally, using premanufactured building components whenever possible can save on installation time and improve safety by reducing the number of tradespeople on a site.
• Costs: According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the average construction cost of a builder’s typical single-family home in 2017 was $237,760. Interior finishes account for the largest share of the cost at 28.6%, and fees and permitting costs have been steadily rising to the point builders are considering them a challenge. Knowing this and the fact that the cost of materials can fluctuate, make sure your project estimation process gets off the right start.
• Labor: In September of 2018, national construction employment had reached a 10-year high with an unemployment rate at an all-time low. However, it seems contractors are still having trouble finding workers. The Associated General Contractors of America created its plan to address the growing shortage and the ACE Mentor Program, a non-profit organization formed in 2002, recruits mentors to encourage high school students to pursue careers in architecture, construction, and engineering.

Below we’ll look at various components of single-family developments and ways CRH can help make these projects successful.

Exterior and Interior Style

From driveways and retaining walls to the outside façade and landscaping, curb appeal sells homes. CRH offers a variety of products to enhance the style of the homes you are building. We manufacture dozens of styles and hundreds of colors of segmental retaining walls and masonry veneers that can be chosen based on the surrounding neighborhoods, local guidelines, or customer preference. We also engineer a variety of architectural windows with varying levels of thermal glazing, sound dampening, and laminates.

For customers interested in building outdoor living spaces, our Belgard line of hardscapes, which includes pavers, retaining walls, outdoor fireplaces, and more, can help them achieve the ideal outdoor oasis.

For the interior of homes, we manufacture a variety of masonry options along with glass, glazing hardware and shower enclosures to meet a multitude of home styles and budgets.