In the past decades, housing shortage in Sweden has accumulated to a level that has led to acute problems for many people in general, and combined with continuously rising housing prices, problems especially occur for younger people with relatively low income. On the market for single-family houses, where wood dominates with 85 – 90 % of market share, firms struggle with a low order intake and currently compete with very low margins, if any. Only few of these firms produce multi-family houses as well, even though production facilities often allow for that. One way to tackle the existing housing shortage could be to get more actors from the single-family house industry to produce multi-family houses. This would trigger competition, improve product quality and utilize economies of scale due to product relatedness, e.g. for prefabricated walls. In that way, profitability and the firms’ margins could be improved.

This study is aiming at exploring potential hinders for Swedish firms producing wooden single-family houses to build multi-family houses. This will be done by deep interviews with decision makers in those firms and, based on that, a follow-up survey-study covering all listed firms in that industry segment will be performed.

The results show that resistance to change and perceived hinders mainly are related to management issues, lack of knowledge about the new segment and constructional requirements.