The Highlands is planning for billions of pounds of investment and thousands of new jobs, but the process for building new homes those workers will need is not fit for purpose. That is the challenge Inverness-based offsite homebuilder MAKAR put to industry and government at BE-ST Fest West 2026 at the Sir Jim McDonald Technology & Innovation Centre (TIC) today (04 Nov 2026).
The Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport aims to attract nearly £6.5 billion of investment and create more than 11,000 long-term Highland jobs. MAKAR CEO Neil Edgar argues that the region’s housing pipeline is not keeping pace, and that employers are already feeling it: some of the 27 suppliers who backed the building of MAKAR’s Paradigm affordable home are struggling to recruit because of a lack of rural housing.
Neil Edgar said, “Where are those people going to live? Housing is infrastructure. If we can plan the ports, the energy, the roads and the jobs, housing cannot arrive years later as an afterthought.”
MAKAR has the capacity to build around 40 homes a year from its workshop outside Inverness, and a clear route to grow towards 400 with more people, shifts and regional facilities. What it lacks is visibility of demand. Scaling is only possible if small rural projects are joined into a pipeline it can plan around.
Rural communities require “two homes here, four there, and six somewhere else”, says Edgar, “A pair of semis on an island will never fit a volume-housebuilder model, but two homes may be exactly what that community needs. Bring those smaller projects together into a programme, keep the packages accessible to smaller firms, and give manufacturers funded, site-ready work with dates they can plan around. That is how fragmented rural demand becomes a manufacturing programme.”
MAKAR’s system is designed for rural Scotland, working around single-track roads, cattle grids, hairpin bends and ferries. Its Paradigm prototype went through the workshop in one week and was wind and watertight after six days on site, with heating, ventilation and a building control inspection completed.
Neil is also urging industry that new homes be not only affordable to build, but affordable for occupants to live in, “Let’s think pre-fit, and not build today what we have to retrofit with public money later,” Neil Edgar said, “Move the money from future burden to current prevention.”
MAKAR’s Paradigm prototype, built with Scottish C16 timber and biogenic materials, has a modelled heating cost of around £6 a week averaged over the year. Early monitoring, analysed with The Data Lab, suggests it may come in below that, with a second winter of data to confirm.
Read Neil’s full speech, including the presentation slides and a short video, delivered at BE-ST Fest West 2026 here