Van Wijnen tackles Dutch housing crisis with factory powered by Azure

With more than 100 years’ experience building sustainable and affordable homes in the Netherlands, Van Wijnen is ideally positioned to respond to the country’s housing crisis, which is among the worst in Europe.

Drawing on strategic and technological support from Microsoft, the company has opened a factory with the capacity to produce 4,000 homes a year using state-of-the-art robots.

The factory produces cheaper homes with 90% less waste and enables Van Wijnen to expand production despite labor shortages.

The housing crisis in the Netherlands is among the worst in Europe. Amid a shortage of more than 400,000 homes, the average selling price of €422,000 is over ten times the median income, and many are priced out of the market.

“There are whole generations that cannot own homes, cannot raise families,” says Richard Werners, Enterprise Architect at the construction company Van Wijnen. “It's kind of a disaster; people are living in their parents’ attics. Everyone knows someone who is affected.”

Ten years ago, Van Wijnen’s leadership started thinking about how they could best approach this problem. “We knew the market was changing drastically, and also that we needed to do more with less.”

Van Wijnen was grappling with a shortage of skilled labor as it sought out the best ways to reduce its carbon footprint and comply with changing regulations. It was clear that to make a real impact and become “future proof” they would need to reposition their company so that “technology played a major role,” says Director Hilbrand Katsma.

Which is why they decided to build a factory where robots make customized houses.

The 11,000-square-meter facility, inspired by car manufacturing plants, opened in 2023 and is the biggest house building factory in Europe. Sitting on a strip of land between two canals in the town of Heerenveen, it has the potential to eventually produce 4,000 homes per year.

“We chose to build from scratch on an undeveloped site so we could do this without boundaries using the latest technology,” Katsma says.

One of the robots lays bricks to intricate specifications, another adds reinforced steel to the structures. Each section of a home – like an exterior wall or a floor – rotates through the factory as different robots add components. An exclusive supplier builds the bathrooms and technical rooms with things like ventilation systems and fuse boxes.

The completed sections are transported to the assembly site and put together in one day by a team of around five people. The finishing touches take another fifteen days.

The entire process is digitized, from design to production. Van Wijnen has developed web portals, configurators and a highly integrated IT landscape. Customers, supported by architects or account managers, configure homes on an app. It offers far greater detail than traditional prefabricated housing – there are millions of possible variations.

“This is not like buying a car where you just choose the model, color and have some options for the interior,” Werners says. “The customer can be very specific and configure whatever they need."

This level of customization and automation makes the factory unique in its industry. “There is nothing else like this,” Werners says. “Not on this scale, not with this much variation and detail.”

Van Wijnen expects the factory will make it cheaper to build homes without compromising on quality or variety.

From traditional construction firm to tech pioneer

Founded in 1907, Van Wijnen has a long history of providing affordable, quality homes. The company’s legacy of serving communities is an asset, but it also meant that becoming a tech-focused organization required a significant shift.

The leadership knew that for an undertaking as ambitious as the factory to be successful, it was essential to find the right technology, supported by the right partners.

“In Microsoft we found a partner that could provide us with scalable and smart technology to support the digital process,” Katsma says. “The technology that powers the production line runs on the Azure Cloud Computing platform and business processes are supported by the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. We also have Microsoft 356 E5 to keep our systems secure.”

“Cloud technology provides the scalability and computing power we need to validate all the designs and generate data to drive the production process.” Werners says. “There are almost two million rules to check that everything fits together. It can take up to two days to validate everything.”

“We also needed a single point of truth across the whole platform,” he adds, “because we can't afford to have issues anywhere along the chain. If one element can’t be produced, we can’t build the block of houses.”

Werners came on board three and half years ago as part of the company’s modernization efforts.

“Ten years ago, Van Wijnen had limited IT,” he says. “Now, we have built an end-to-end technology platform. The technology is highly interconnected, and we have scaled up the IT team from seven people to almost 40.”

“And that's only the corporate part,” he adds. “At a certain point, we had almost 200 IT experts building the technology platform. We’re a construction company but it almost feels like we’re really a tech company now.”

The change could not have come soon enough. Since Van Wijnen’s leaders decided to build the factory, skilled labor has become even more scarce. Some 63% of companies in the Netherlands’ construction sector face staff shortages, according to the 2024 Boels Rental Construction Index.

As well as helping to tackle the housing crisis and labor shortages, the factory enables Van Wijnen to drastically reduce waste.

There is no leftover concrete, bricks, insulation material or other residues. And because the homes can be quickly assembled by a handful of workers, there are fewer vehicles coming back and forth to the site.

“On a traditional construction site, builders can be there for months,” Werners says. “During that time, you’ll need heating, toilets, drinking water and multiple waste containers. With the factory-produced houses, we reduce waste by 90%.”

Because the robots are so precise – the permissible deviation is no more than a few millimeters – there is virtually no need for sealant.

The completed houses are equipped with energy use monitors, which help to make them more efficient.

“Cloud technology provides the scalability and computing power we need to validate all the designs and generate data to drive the production process. There are almost two million rules to check that everything fits together. It can take up to two days to validate everything.”

Richard Werners, Enterprise Architect, Van Wijnen

Why laying strong foundations is key

Van Wijnen maintains long-term partnerships with the housing associations who buy its homes, which is another reason it places a strong emphasis on quality.

“We want to work with them well into the future, and we are able to give them guarantees that the buildings will be durable and in good condition for a long time,” Katsma says.

The houses from the factory are sustainable and circular: it is possible to disassemble them and rebuild houses somewhere else.

Large investments were needed to build the right organization, technology platform and production lines. Now that the underlying technology is in place it will be easier to scale up and build more factories like this one in the future.

And as Van Wijnen gathers more data from this process, there is scope for introducing new technologies. “I can definitely imagine that we might be able to design houses with support from generative AI in the near future,” Werners says.

While the potential for new use cases is intriguing, Katsma won’t start exploring them until they have successfully scaled up the factory and feel confident they have gotten everything right.

“There’s a lot we could do; the possibilities are endless,” he says, “but first we need to do this thing really well, because what we’re doing is huge.”

Hilbrand Katsma, General Manager, Van Wijnen

“We want to work with them well into the future, and we are able to give them guarantees that the buildings will be durable and in good condition for a long time.”

Hilbrand Katsma, Director, Van Wijnen