The recent meteoric rise and crash of Katerra offered many in the modular construction world a vivid-albeit brief-glimpse into the promise and pitfall of attempting to scale off-site construction into a viable production model. Plus, you’re limited on the design end.”Ĭourtesy Dvele Dvele modules on the factory line show the efficiencies of scale and productivity that makes off-site a compelling model. In many cases you have to get on a waitlist, or you have to pay high delivery fees, and you still need to build a foundation and run utilities and have a skilled general contractor manage assembly. “Modular companies continue to sell the model as faster and less expensive, but the data doesn’t seem to support that. “There’s a place for modular, but the comparisons to stick-built construction are still very much apples to oranges,” says Sergio Rodriguez, a second-generation builder who spent a decade with Eden Housing and Baywest Home before founding Integrum Construction in 2019. While roof truss and wall panel component shops have increasingly helped boost the speed and efficiency of production builders since the 1980s, true off-site construction of detached, single-family homes, in the form of finished wall panels and roof and floor assemblies that are quickly connected on the jobsite, has yet to scale meaningfully since Sears closed up shop prior to WWII. The company, of course, was Sears, Roebuck & Co., and the Sears Modern Homes division, which sold houses out of mail-order catalogs from 1908 into the 1940s, likely still holds the top spot for volume (not to mention inflation-adjusted revenue) as the country’s first and foremost modular builder. Offering upward of 340 different floor plans, the company sold enough houses to necessitate the launch of a mortgage finance unit, and the homes were field-customized to a level that makes them hard to identify as factory-built homes to this day.
during the heyday of modular construction. Manufactured off-site and delivered via railroad for on-site assembly, more than 70,000 single family homes-many including complex central air, plumbing, and electricity-were delivered by a single company to markets across the U.S. Courtesy Dvele Dvele and other off-site builders are pushing beyond the ADU boundaries to offer single-family product that rivals stick-built construction.
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