Dive Brief:

• New York City-based Turner Construction has launched a new business focused on offsite manufacturing and construction, the company announced on May 6.
• The subsidiary, named xPL Offsite, draws on Turner’s experience with offsite manufacturing and modular projects to offer those services to clients across the country, according to the news release.
• Drew Kerr, vice president and general manager of xPL Offsite, said that while the company sees the need for offsite techniques with projects such as semiconductor fabs, data centers and EV manufacturing plants, Turner also recognizes its usefulness in other segments, such as sports and public assembly projects, healthcare and aviation.

Dive Insight:

xPL Offsite will leverage a 200,000-square-foot facility in Decatur, Alabama, as its in-house advanced manufacturing facility, per the news release. It will also offer a suite of modular products such as central utility plants, MEP skids and racks, modular bathroom pods and clean rooms and IT closets.

Kerr said that the company did its due diligence to make sure the business would pencil out first. Company leaders wanted to avoid burdening design partners, subs, internal resources and clients with something that didn’t make sense.

“It’s not a business that fits every project, every client, every tight market segment,” Kerr told Construction Dive. “We have to focus on where it makes the most sense.”

The new arm comes amid an uncertain economy as tariffs continue to roil the construction industry and details shift as to what is affected, along with how much. Despite the uncertain outlook, Kerr said that the move was made based on projections of how much Turner’s advanced technology market segment would grow.

“There’s certainly things that you have to overcome and challenges for the industry to overcome, but we see the growth and we see the driven opportunity from the clients, who are not stopping development in these market segments over the next one to three years and beyond,” Kerr said. “We see that opportunity, right now, as our time to get in, support our Turner business and support our clients, programmatically, even outside of the Turner business.”