Wouldn’t life for modular home builders be sweet if only the modular factory would not only build the house but also provide the crane and set crew to erect it and finish it completely.
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| photo courtesy of The Home Store |
Several builders have asked me about this scenario over the past couple days and I even had one factory owner tell me he is seriously thinking about offering this option to his builders.
It sounds great but there is a dark side to this that needs explored. First, there are few modular home factories in the US doing this at the present time. These factories tend to be low volume selling less than 40 homes a year. Scaling that up for a factory producing 150 to 200 homes a year could prove disastrous if every builder chose this option.
For example, let’s suppose a modular home factory is producing 12 modules a week which equates to 3 homes. If the factory contracts both the crane and set crews that would only give them 12-13 days work a month. The set crews can’t live on just that amount of work so they will schedule work in the off days.
If the factory falls behind on delivery or there is rain every day like we’ve seen this year those set crews that turned down other jobs because they were contracted by a single factory may look for other work. Some factories are already supplying their own set crews from members of their production staff to try to eliminate this problem and it appears to be working for them.
Secondly the factory will need finish labor for each house. Looking at those 12 houses per month produced by the factory and assuming they could finish a house in 30 days, that may require up to 10-12 finish crews working full time for the factory. Remember these homes could be hundreds of miles from the factory in any direction.
I can’t imagine any factory finding 20-30 skilled finish laborers willing to work out of town 5 days a week every month of the year. Even if they could, what happens when production falls? Not only will the factory production line workers be laid off but also those 10 finish crews.
The only way this could even approach being a viable idea would be builders willing to sell standard ‘house plans’ provided by the factory. No customization allowed other than the factory options. If a builder’s customer didn’t want any of those plans, the factory set and finish option would not be available.
If that were the case the number of homes requiring that factory option would probably drop to one a month and that is something the factory could do but why would they want to for just one house a month. I was told you could build a modular home with only 7 phone calls. A clerical person at the factory could make those calls if there were no customization by the customer.
If someone in our industry could develop a complete factory based package for setting and finishing a modular builder’s home, either standard plan or customized, that would be the innovation modular single family home builders would love.
