The Chinese government has enacted a series of policies and regulations to promote the development of prefabricated houses in recent years, including applying prefabricated construction to public housing as pilot projects. Prefabricated construction has been regarded as an effective means of enhancing construction quality and efficiency, but the implementation effect has not reached the expected objectives with regard to the prefabricated public housing in China. This paper aims to investigate major factors inhibiting the effective adoption of prefabricated construction to different kinds of public housing in China, including low-cost commercial residential house, public rental house, shantytowns transform house, and others. Ten critical factors were selected through literature review and classified into four groups, namely "governmental incentives," "industrial chain," "technology," and "cost." A questionnaire including obstacle factors and design, construction and management questions was sent out to developers of public housing in Beijing, China. There are 65 public housing pilot projects in total to investigate, and 45 project developers gave valid responses. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to identify the major barriers, concluding that "scale diseconomies due to inadequate level of standardization," "high cost compared to conventional construction," and "incomplete industry chain" are the top three obstacles. The paper also indicates that the most dominant barrier is cost with reference to prefabricated public housing in China from developers' perspective. While for public rental house, the primary barrier is industrial chain. These findings can help developers of different kinds of public housing to understand major barriers, and government to take on measures to reduce cost.
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