What Toll Brothers pioneered way back before 1990 is just now roughing in the frame of a new trend among homebuilders. The prefabricated wall panels and roof trusses that the Horsham builder introduced in the late 1980s are now making their way onto more construction sites across the nation.

The biggest driver of the fad, though, is the shortage in skilled construction workers, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal by Chris Kirkham. The industry’s workforce is down 30 percent from 2006, when it was highest.

“We don’t need as many skilled workers on the job site,” Toll Brothers Regional President Rob Parahus said of the prefab approach. “A four- or five-man crew can put together a house in the field that might take a lot longer and a lot more skilled people to put together if they had to build every wall panel on the site.”

Now KB Home, Bensonwood and other homebuilders are jumping on the bandwagon.

Read much more about the emerging trend and Toll Brothers’ role in getting it off the ground in The Wall Street Journal here, and check out previous MONTCO Today coverage of Toll Brothers here.