Same Problems, Different Continent: 30 Years of SIPs with Joe Pasma
I had a conversation last week with Joe Pasma. He's a US-based SIPs consultant who's been in the industry since 1992 - the year I was getting out of nappies. Three decades of installs, manufacturing, sales, technical support, and forensic work on jobs that turned to mush. If there's a part of the SIP supply chain he hasn't put his hands on, I'd be surprised.
Check out Joe's work over at PGS Consulting LLC...
I went into the call expecting to compare notes on the technical side - panel comparison, OSB sources, code compliance, all that. We covered all of it. But the part that stuck with me afterwards was something else entirely, and to be honest, is what I'm pushing for as a part of my business.
Every problem we have with SIPs in Australia, they have in the United States. The exact same problems. The exact same conversations with builders. The exact same first-cost arguments. The exact same disconnect between how a SIPs job should run and how it actually runs.
That, to me, is either depressing or extremely useful. I've decided to take it as useful.
Here's what we covered.
"We're not even 2% of the market"
That was Joe's number for the SIPs share of US residential construction. Not 20%. Two. After 30+ years in the game.
He framed it as an "infantile industry." There are around 40 SIP manufacturers/suppliers across North America, with 15 to 20 of those sitting inside the Structural Insulated Panel Association (SIPA). And even with a peak body, an established supply chain, evaluation reports, model codes, and decades of installed projects on the ground - the needle doesn't move.
I asked him whether he thought it was a US-specific problem, a long pause, then: "I think it's identical across the entire world. It doesn't matter where you go. It's the same thought process."
That tracks with what we see here. We've got a National Construction Code, a CodeMark pathway, pre-engineered span tables for specific suppliers, a small but growing number of factories, and a residential market crying out for faster delivery. And SIPs are still a rounding error.
So the question isn't "how do we make SIPs better." We're past that. The product works. The question is: why isn't anyone doing it?
"It's not a material problem. It's a people problem."
This is the line of the entire conversation. Joe said it in the context of social media - specifically, the YouTube comment section under any SIP video, where the same handful of objections show up every time. Cost too much. Take too long. Fall apart because they're OSB. Can't be repaired.
But it applies to the whole MMC industry. It's the line you'd use to explain why a perfectly designed SIP project blows out on cost. Why a builder who installed panels once and "didn't see the savings" decides never to touch them again. Why developers won't touch them at scale. Why an architect who's never coordinated with a SIP supplier still specifies them anyway.
The panels are fine. The system works. The execution doesn't.
If you're going to take one thing away from this article, take that one.
Why SIPs jobs blow the budget (and the panel isn't the reason)
I'll tell you what I see on most custom SIP houses that come across my desk. The architectural plans get drawn by one person. The structural gets engineered by another. The SIP shop drawings get done by someone else again - usually me. And then the builder takes the lot to site.
Nine times out of ten, the builder defaults back to the architectural plans as their source of truth. They set out off the architect's drawings, not the SIP drawings. The steel integration is figured out on the fly. The panel sequence is...
"we'll sort it out on site."
That's how you turn a fast, controlled, factory-built shell into a slow, messy, over-budget job. And then the builder shrugs and says SIPs cost more than stick-frame.
Joe's response when I described this: "It sounds identical to our situation over here."
The fix is front-loading. More design effort, more coordination, more time before the slab is poured. A few extra grand on the design side to save tens of thousands on the build side. The job of the SIP drawings is to be the bones of the project - the source of truth that everything else snaps to. The architectural plans, the steel, the services, the cladding, all of it should refer back. When that happens, SIPs do exactly what they're supposed to.
When that doesn't happen, you get exactly what we've all seen: a beautiful product on a poorly-managed project, and a builder who never tries it again.
The "Tesla" configurator for housing
Joe's working with a developer in the US who's trying to vertically integrate the entire stack; land development, factory, panel manufacture, build, handover. The pitch is that the customer goes online, picks one of four or five model homes, picks finishes from a tight set of options, and gets handed keys at the end. Kind of like configuring a Tesla online.
That model isn't new. Project home builders have been doing standardised plans for decades. But what's new is doing it with a high-performance envelope, factory production, and a fixed timeline you can actually promise.
Here's the maths that landed for me. In Western Australia right now, a home build is taking well over a year, dragging out to over 18 months in most cases. In comparison, North Queensland project homes can still get up in eight to ten months. If a vertically-integrated SIP builder can promise six months and deliver, they don't need to grow their workforce to grow their output. They literally double their capacity in a year. Same team. Same site supervisor. Same trades. Twice the houses.
Joe's framing: "How do you get good at something? You keep doing it over and over and keep refining it." We've taken that lesson and applied it to cars, planes, and consumer goods, shipping. We refuse to apply it to housing. And we wonder why the cost-per-home keeps climbing.
The romantic Australian dream of the veranda out the front, family home and room for the clothesline out the back, most people can't afford anymore. And honestly, when you're inside the house, you don't see the cladding, the roof line, the stone feature wall. The home is what you make it inside. The exterior shell wants to be repeatable.
The first builder in Australia who properly nails this is going to eat, and surely someone has cottoned by now.
There are three forms of SIP panel. Most builders only know one.
This was a useful one. In the US, Joe categorises panels three ways:
The blank. Just the laminated panel. Skin-foam-skin. No routing, no openings, nothing.
The prefabricated panel. Edges routed for splines, gable ends cut, window and door openings cut - but no timber installed in the panel. Loose timber ships separately packed or the builder sources locally.
The ready-to-assemble panel. Everything possible done in the factory. Splines, timber, openings, the lot. The site crew is putting a "LEGO" set together.
Joe spent ten years installing panels and worked with the second and third categories. His view: "If I had my choice, I would always take the ready-to-assemble." A crew of three or four can set a house in days.
Most Australian SIP buyers - homeowners, builders, developers - only ever really see option two. They rarely get told option three is on the table, because most local manufacturers aren't set up for it, the ones that are aren't communicating the difference or the people buying the product aren't willing to listen.
If you're buying SIPs and you're not asking the supplier exactly how much of the panel comes ready-assembled and how much arrives loose, you're leaving install speed on the table. And install speed is the entire point.
When SIPs are the wrong call
I want to make sure this article doesn't read like a product push. Joe's words: "I live in a SIP house. They're not the end-all, be-all."
There are projects where SIPs aren't the right product. Tight inner-city sites with no room for on-site panel storage. Heavily articulated designs that work against the panel module. Jobs where the steel structure is doing most of the work and the SIPs are forced into a role they weren't designed for. Projects where the budget genuinely won't carry the upfront panel cost, even with the back-end savings.
You can run SIPs on a tight city site - Joe's done it, I've seen it done - but only with eyes wide open. Panels stored in the street and shuffled day to night, slower install, higher labour component. The client has to know all of that going in. If they're expecting the panels to "fall out of the sky and put themselves together," it almost certainly ends in tears.
The most useful thing an experienced SIPs designer or consultant can do for a client is not always "yes, we can do it in SIPs." Sometimes it's "this isn't the right system for what you're trying to build." Both answers are valuable. Only one of them gets repeat clients.
Why a 30% cost spike is good news for prefab
Construction costs in Australia are up 20–30% over the last few years. Combination of supply chain disruption, geopolitics, materials inflation, labour shortages. Pick your poison.
I asked Joe if that hurt SIPs more than stick-frame. The answer surprised me: "When the industry sees spikes in pricing, SIPs have a tendency to do better."
The reasoning is straightforward. The single biggest objection to SIPs has always been "the panels cost more than stick-frame." When stick-frame inflates 30%, the gap closes slightly. Suddenly the maths gets a little more interesting. And once you layer in the speed advantage; half the time on site, half the labour, faster lock-up, earlier handover, earlier income for a developer, the conversation starts to change up a bit.
If you're a builder looking at the current market and trying to work out where the edge is, the timing for off-site is better than it's been in a decade. Not despite the cost increases. Because of them.
The next wave isn't the old guard
Joe and I both landed here independently. The builders, developers, and designers who'll move SIPs and off-site construction forward in the next ten years are not the ones who've spent the last twenty refining their stick-frame process.
Joe put it bluntly: "The old folkers go out the back door. The new people are gonna replace them with new ideas, new ways of doing things."
The next wave is the people who don't have an old way to defend. They look at SIPs and don't see a threat to their existing workflow, they're seeing it as a fresh starting point. They're the ones running the numbers on entire project costs instead of material costs and how it scales. They're the ones who don't carry thirty years of "we've always done it this way" baggage. They're the one's who are openminded.
If you're a SIP supplier, designer, or installer, those are the people to back. If you're a progressive thinking builder reading this and you've been told you're naive for wanting to do things differently - keep going. Joe and I are both betting on you.
What I took away
A few things, in no particular order.
The product side is sorted. Pre-designed panel spans, evaluation reports, code compliance, fire data, manufacturing capacity - none of that is really the bottleneck.
What's missing is execution. Front-loading. Coordination.
The discipline of treating a SIP job (or any other pre-fabbed product) like a manufactured product, not a custom build with an unusual wall system.
The cost objection is a story, not a number. Once you compare overall project costs properly (you must collect ALL the data possible), and at scale, and once stick-frame inflates, the story falls gets some holes. The job is to tell the real story better than the old one.
The biggest opportunity right now is the builder or developer who can promise a delivery date and hit it. In a market where builds are taking 18+ months, a SIP builder who can deliver in under eight months has a marketing position no one else can really hold.
Suitability matters. SIPs aren't right for every site. Saying "no" to the wrong job protects the reputation of the system for the next ten right ones.
And finally... the same conversation is happening in Perth, in North Queensland, in Melbourne, and probably in every other construction industry on the planet. The same bottlenecks, the same maths, the same opportunity. Whoever cracks the execution side first gets to set the standard for the next decade.
I know which side of that bet I'm on. Joe's been on it for thirty-four years.
Joe Pasma is a US-based SIPs consultant with 30+ years in the structural insulated panel industry. He's worked across manufacturing, engineering, installation, sales, marketing, and forensic investigation, and is a member of the Structural Insulated Panel Association (SIPA). The conversation above has been edited for clarity and length.
Andrew Neilsen is the director of Nu Creative Design and founder of Off Site Logic, a consultancy focused on the correct application of Modern Methods of Construction.
