Let’s say that a magic fairy princess came along and granted our wishes of fewer regulations, lower freight costs and removed the misconception home buyers have of equating modular with manufactured homes, what impact would it have on our market share?
The answer is none!
I’ve been sitting in my office this week having this conversation with myself about how one goes about growing modular housing’s market share of new home building. I quickly went past the obvious ones like hire more sales reps, promote the advantages of modular in the media and lowering prices. All those are good things but there is a more fundamental problem here.
We have a finite number of builders and no programs to attract new ones. Many of our factories are older and need upgrades to produce more units. Other factories have closed their doors and been converted into production facilities for other industries.
One way to tell if an industry, any industry, is stagnant is watching big players swallowing up smaller or financially troubled players with no new factories on the drawing boards. That is happening in the residential modular industry right now.
So how do we gain market share without adding builders, more capacity and additional labor? How do we compete with the tract builders that are once again buying huge tracts of land or Clayton that is on a buying spree picking up large regional site builders with land to build tons of modular homes?
How do we attract new site builders to modular? How do we educate local code officials? How do factories educate builders on the latest regulations and procedures?
Feel free to jump in here anytime. There are a lot more things that need attention.
What I believe should happen first is a consensus that there are problems for our industry beyond over-regulation and high transportation costs.
The two organizations that support our industry, the MHBA and NAHB’s BSC, are the logical places to start. The emphasis of both should be to grow stronger by recruiting modular builders, modular factories and those vendors serving our industry. I keep looking at both of their membership lists and quite frankly I am appalled.
Even with all their efforts to recruit new members, most builders and a lot of factories just don’t seem to understand that a few active members can’t carry the ball for all the ones that have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for the fairy princess to show up.
Both of these organizations are ready, willing and very eager to jump into the fray with programs to attract new modular home builders, help factories find the resources to expand and build new factories, produce education programs for builders and factory people and fight for all things modular. The MHBA and the BSC are not two opponents squaring off to see who can be stronger. Instead they are approaching the same goal of a better modular industry with similar platforms and by joining both or even one of them, they will collectively grow stronger.
But none of that can even begin to happen without people joining together and maybe, just maybe, we can say we no longer need you Fairy Princess.
