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And welcome to Real Estate Connections podcast.
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And today we are going to talk about something I love, modular housing.
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And I love a certain company that I actually had a tour of, Bensonwood.
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(Upbeat Music) Welcome to Real Estate Connections podcast, where relationships open doors.
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I'm Mary Foerster.
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And housing is a universal need.
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We are often thinking about our existing housing, our future housing, that possibly of family members.
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This is where you're gonna hear the issues and the people who are working the issues every day.
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Please hit subscribe and like if you find this podcast helpful to you.
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Thank you.
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And today we have Seth Clarke.
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He is the director of pre-construction.
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Seth, what does it feel like to work for one of the best companies out there in modular housing?
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Well, it's tremendous.
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Thank you for the welcome, Mary.
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Bensonwood is a very special place to be.
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It is a place where innovation is married with a longstanding tradition and just a real commitment to quality and to improving people's lives.
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We're all about improving the standard of living for the people who live in and work in the buildings that we create, the homes that we build.
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And you started in 1972.
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I think I wasn't born yet, but I won't go there.
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But in 1972, with two contractors, two cabinet makers.
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Yeah, so the- And look what has happened.
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The history of our company started out with Ted Benson and his brother, Steven, creating a job doing, or a company doing all the odd jobs that people didn't wanna do.
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And they got into scavenging parts of old timber frames and learning from the craft and the details of that type of construction.
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What they discovered is a real timelessness about that these structures were built to last the centuries.
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And that inspired in Ted a desire to continue that tradition first as a timber frame company, but eventually he wanted to expand that idea to many, many more forms of construction, all with the idea of building.
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How can we build things to last and to be adaptable and to be efficient that way?
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And I remember back in the 70s and eight, well, it was the 80s, I guess, somebody I know had a modular home in suburban, let's see, Fairfax County, so in Northern Virginia.
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And my sense was people were looking down the nose at this modular home, but it was lovely.
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And as a realtor many years later and in that same market, I don't think I ever came across a question, this is a modular home.
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Nothing, I mean, what has happened over that time period that we don't even notice that there's no distinction anymore?
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Yeah, well, there's been so many gains in manufacturing, comparatively many more gains in manufacturing efficiency than there has been in just the construction industry in general.
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What that means that translates into is that your chances of getting higher quality through a manufactured process are actually incredibly high now, and your chances of actually running into problems with home construction through just the traditional means of onsite construction, it's actually pretty fraught.
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And so that's one thing.
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The other is just our company does pride itself in being very of a different mindset from the prefab modes of your, when things were built sort of slapdash and very cheaply, we build a premium product, but it has the great benefits of being able to really enhance the lifespan of the building and the quality of the lives of people who live in it.
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And holding that commitment has just driven all of the innovations and processes that we've instituted over the years.
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May I quickly just make one clarification?
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Go for it.
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So we tend to see words like modular and prefab and things used interchangeably.
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And I just, we at Bensonwood tend to use the word offsite construction as the sort of the general umbrella term.
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And in fact, we build in a form called panelized architecture, timber frame and panelized, as opposed to volumetric boxes that you think of as modular.
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That we see on the highway.
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Exactly.
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Half of a building on a highway, right?
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Yeah.
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Yeah, good.
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Yeah, so Bensonwood reached a crossroads at one point where we had to decide whether to go down that path of doing volumetric boxes or panelized.
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And to the point that you made, when you visit one of our homes and you walk through it, there'd be nothing really that would indicate to you that it was built in a factory.
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And that's because the panelized approach really opens up a lot more possibility for design.
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You really don't know that you're in a
Load full transcript
prefabricated home.
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It just comes together.
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It arrives differently onsite.
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But once it's raised, once it's built, it is every bit as strong and, you know, as conventional construction, if not more so.
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I'm a real geek when it comes to things like construction.
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And a year ago, we were invited to take a tour of Bensonwood from a developer who was going to be getting into the ADU world.
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And Massachusetts, of course, had just passed its legislation.
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And no, New Hampshire has passed its legislation as well.
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So allowing home, property owners, allowing property owners to put an accessory dwelling unit on their property, or separate or whatever, or part of the existing dwelling.
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So I took a tour.
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And as a visual learner, I was amazed at, what is it, you have 110,000 square feet of construction space in that building.
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And to watch a panel be built, and to know that construction is fairly fast.
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Well, the electrical engineer that I live with, and I are like, talk to us about energy efficiency, because your demonstrator made some unbelievable claim about energy efficiency because of this panelized process that you're doing.
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Right, right.
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That is definitely the big payoff for building in this way.
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If you think about the performance of your home as the direct, what's the word I wanna say, the direct byproduct of the system that is used.
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So much of what we have become accustomed to as Americans, and common refrain is that a house needs to breathe.
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That is actually something we've just inherited from a hundred years of building in substandard conditions.
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Site built, stick built construction.
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If you adopt a system that actually aims higher for greater control, greater air tightness, greater thermal control, so that you're not heating and reheating the same air inside your home over and over and over through the course of a day, then you really start to stand to benefit a great deal from a more systematized manufacturing process.
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So what you saw on the line there in the factory were panels that are super airtight unto themselves with a very clear plan of how we're going to deliver those panels to the job site, how we're going to join them up and seal them together, how we're going to minimize as many connections as we can, but make sure that we do belt and suspenders sealing up those joints as much as possible.
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The windows and doors are not held off until later on and when the house has been rained on and it's been sitting out there in the weather, they're actually installed there in our warm dry factory at eye level.
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And as such, they can be just installed with a detailed precision that prevents air leaks and water leaks later.
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And think about your onsite construction.
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A lot of men in my family are in construction, I have been in their careers and we have weather, everybody has weather now, but we have weather in New England and those gaps, those window gaps would stay open for a winter.
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And I was looking at a site recently and it sat without windows and door for quite a long time.
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And the risk of mold, the risk of other deterioration in the property, the efficacy sounded so unbelievable to us.
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So how does a house breathe when you have that level of kind of protection from drafts, et cetera?
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Yeah, so in a couple of ways.
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First of all, we definitely believe in fresh air inside our homes.
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And when you create such an airtight envelope, it moves from being a passive exchange of air through cracks and things to more of a managed, mechanically managed exchange.
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Our all of our homes use an energy recovery ventilation system that does a very small amount of air exchange, but it's just enough to keep the air inside feeling even fresher than it does outside.
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That air is both tempered to be warmed so that you're not feeling cold drafts, but it's also being filtered so that any pollen or wildfire smoke or any other outside smells don't make their way into the home.
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I said it was tempered.
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What's actually happening is the air exchanger actually uses the heat of the exhaust air.
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It recaptures that heat and then applies it to the supply air coming in so that you're not wasting any energy.
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So that's one thing.
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The other thing is that we appreciate that the humidity levels inside and outside the home are always changing.
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And as such, that needs to be monitored as well in the modern home.
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We have dehumidifiers, we have humidifiers, and that's important, but we accept that there is going to be a certain amount of migration of moisture that happens.
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And it's just, it's like a cold front and a warm front in weather.
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They move including through the walls.
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Our walls, by choice, we have decided to build our walls as vapor open, which means that vapor, humidity can move in and out of the wall
freely.
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Not with abandon, it's not like drafts, but the moisture can migrate.
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If a wall, for instance, became damp by some overflowing sink or something unexpected, it would have the ability to dry out both to the inside as well as to the outside.
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So many of the mold problems that people have discovered in their homes of 20 and 30 year occupancy are because the wall assembly tried to do a sort of white knuckled, keep the moisture out at all costs with a plastic barrier.
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Wrap it up, wrap it up, yes, right.
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Exactly.
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And over time we've discovered and learned that that is actually an unhealthy way because it's near impossible to completely prevent that with just a sheet of plastic.
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And so if you have any barrier like that that is trapping moisture, soon your insulation gets condensation and the seed of mold can begin.
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So yeah, that's a really critical piece for us about applying building science, the most advanced kind of thinking around building science to our homes.
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It's fascinating reading your history on the website of this company, Bensonwood.
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They start in 72 and then they go all the way to 2022.
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And you get to see the progress of commitment over time.
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That's a lot of years, 50 years, right?
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Or more.
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And you get to see the commitment from two people reclaiming timber to maybe we can build it here, part of it here and put it together there to let's create some machinery that allow us to actually merge the joints better and all the way.
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It's a fascinating report.
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And whoever did that did a great job on that, including the materials that you use, the science that you brought into it more than just the backyard in New Hampshire, but the science over all these decades that you brought into it.
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Go ahead, you wanna say something?
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The thing I love about that and really what drove me to want to steer my career to come work for Bensonwood is that that history is line upon line, brick upon brick, using everything that they learned along the way and growing out of it.
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There's no hard right turns or U-turns in our history.
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And everything that we learned about Timber Frame was in essence what we are applying today to our panelized architecture.
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We have so much to talk about here.
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We really, really do.
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Because I don't want to ignore commercial and institutional.
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We're talking residential.
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We're talking about fairly high end construction.
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Let's start with a buyer.
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I'm 55, I'm not 55, but if I were 55 years old and I was thinking about maybe moving to another state and I was thinking I'm gonna get a beautiful, panelized, high performance home from a company like Bensonwood.
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How does this all begin?
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Well, we do directly with the customer and we engage with them about their home, their family, their needs, and the property that they hope to build on.
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A big part of what my team does in the sales department at Bensonwood is actually educate and to help qualify people who are interested in what we do.
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We want to try and help those people get to the right destination point as quickly as possible.
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We are big proponents of exploring and utilizing the system-based approach that all our catalog of homes has been based on.
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So if you visit our website, there are collections of homes that are organized by platform, which is a loose definition of kind of a design style.
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And there are options within those platforms that have been really carefully considered and developed over the course of decades.
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And it's informed by years and years of the work that we did as Tipper Frame Company.
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But as we pivot more toward how can we help more people access this kind of quality, we are now adopting much more of a product mindset with the great advantages that within those systems, people can achieve much greater quality than they would if they were to drive to do sort of a custom approach and sort of invent it all from whole cloth.
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Right.
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So my partner and I, my husband and I are interested.
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We contact Bensonwood.
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We have some kind of qualifying conversation.
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Is Bensonwood, your company, the right fit for this goal?
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And we talk financing.
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Are you connected to financing in any way?
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We certainly try and help connect clients with known lenders who are aware of an offsite approach and can help that.
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We don't finance the homes ourselves, but we're definitely involved there.
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geographic area within New England?
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Yes, we do.
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So the primary market, I would say, for our product homes tends to be the New England area, mostly because the shipping costs beyond New England do start to weigh heavier and the product homes are meant
to target a market that is hopefully more accessible.
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For other custom work and sort of higher budget projects, we will tend to see those going further afield.
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We've done homes all over the lower 48.
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And generally we're interested if, from wherever people may be calling, we'll take a look.
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And when I say qualifying, that qualifying call, it's mainly to evaluate honestly alignment in objectives.
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Yes, thanks.
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There can be cheaper ways to build out there, but we wanna understand that the priority that we have for high performance outcome and the standards of quality that we are shared and valued, we wanna know whether we can deliver to a particular location and evaluate the site that they've chosen.
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Obviously budget is a big determinant.
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We really don't want to lead anyone down the path only to be, find out at the end of along the investigation that they just can't afford.
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They can't afford it.
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Right.
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People's time is valuable.
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And generally we want to use that time also to just help kind of share and educate about how the process will be a little different.
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With an offsite build, there's a stronger emphasis on making decisions in an orderly way.
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Even with a custom design, you want to kind of work through the process in a progressive way that helps make the whole process predictable, both for the client as well as for our production.
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Our factory likes predictability and we're very schedule driven to try and help compress it for the advantage of the project.
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That's one of our major selling points is being able to compress, but that involves obviously front loading some decisions and keeping things moving along on track.
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And I was also astounded in the tour how quickly construction occurs.
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Once you're set up for the schedule, the products are manufactured very quickly.
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I was astounded.
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So, but can we go back to just like look at the site?
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Where do I begin in terms of a site?
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I buy the land and I deal with the local government entity to see if it's buildable.
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And then I actually get the permit for it.
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And then I contract with you all to actually build there.
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How do we conform to anything that the municipality or the town is interested in making sure happens?
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Yeah, just quickly, oftentimes it will happen in a slightly different order.
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Folks will reach out to us around the time that they're sort of big decision-making level.
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And oftentimes are building within the rights of a particular site.
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They may know that at a higher level, but they won't be actually getting a permit until they've arrived at a design, usually working with us and our teams.
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You remind me of your question though.
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But so what happens?
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So for example, my town is not crazy about ADUs.
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Right.
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Okay, it's one of the few in the state that are, you know, holding back.
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But so they start imposing, no, you can't do X.
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So that's one of the things we want to kind of explore early on and make sure again, we're not heading down the path only to be upset later.
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We have a design team here and we do encourage clients to kind of take the bull by the horns as well and work through this.
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Oftentimes they are talking with general contractors, local contractors at the same time.
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It could be a fantastic resource.
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We also introduce them to site planners who will ultimately help develop a survey and a site plan with the design represented there.
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So between that, we tend to get out pretty early in front of some of these issues.
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The fact that we're building in an offsite way comes with it also just the, you know, additional question sometimes for local jurisdictions who can respond in different ways.
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Being maybe unfamiliar with that approach, they may have questions that we are right there with you as a client to help answer.
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For instance, with a, you know, a framing package that comes from a factory that's all sealed up in a panel, framing inspector might well ask the question, you know, how do I know what's inside these panels?
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And so we answer that in a variety of ways, depending on the jurisdiction and everything from providing a third party certification, labeled actual stickered panels, you know, reflecting inspection.
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We invite the inspectors to come into our factories and see firsthand how they're installed.
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And then if really, you know, if needs be, we can actually furnish actual timed photographs of the panels in production, photos by the hundreds to show the panels and what their contents are before they were sealed up.
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Excellent.
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Wow.
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Again, efficiency, it just,
it is, it's amazing to me.
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Are there companies doing the same thing?
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Are you seeing other companies doing the panelized approach?
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Sure.
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So, you know, a lot of how we build was developed, you know, decades ago in European countries, Sweden in particular, that this way of building is actually the predominant way of building in Sweden.
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We were among the first who had the technologies that we have here in North America and have certainly taken it the furthest in terms of volume and production of this sort of, this type.
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But offsite construction in various forms is growing substantially.
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And it's for that reason that we talked about at the top of the session here is, you know, the industry gains in construction have just really languished.
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Whereas the gains in manufacturing efficiencies have just skyrocketed.
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You think of all the technology that's being incorporated now and the ability to manage systems and get better results in a warm, dry factory than you could possibly get out, you know, cutting boards onsite.
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On a site.
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Yeah, onsite.
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The just waste factor as one example, you know.
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Time, time too.
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I watched my husband, he's been installing a floor in the bathroom and oh, I need a certain tool.
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Oh, so that's another trip, you know.
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And it's fascinating because on your tour, the tools were all there, already pre-sorted for the work that was being done at that time.
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So that's the kind of efficiency.
00:25:48.665 --> 00:26:00.958
Let's touch on this topic of manufactured versus modular because as consumers, and I understand the state of Massachusetts, interchanged those things in some legislation it proposed.
00:26:00.958 --> 00:26:05.750
So the difference between manufactured housing and modular housing.
00:26:07.665 --> 00:26:45.415
I may not be the best person to speak to this, but, you know, with manufactured housing, the, what I think is most commonly referred to, it actually goes all the way to sort of trailer style housing, things that can be completely mobilized, put on the, the big change in the legislation, as I understand it is that it no longer requires a chassis, which was an expensive piece of that, that needed to be, you know, built in a steel structure, potentially with axles and wheels, that it could be relocated.
00:26:46.875 --> 00:26:50.625
So that just gives you a sense for the wide range.
00:26:51.040 --> 00:26:53.375
We're kind of on the other end of that spectrum.
00:26:53.415 --> 00:26:58.375
You know, our walls are upwards of
13 inches thick and super insulated.
00:26:59.833 --> 00:27:02.125
It just is manufactured offsite.
00:27:02.540 --> 00:27:02.875
Right.
00:27:03.208 --> 00:27:08.250
The other thing too is the regulation on manufactured housing is federal legislation.
00:27:08.750 --> 00:27:17.333
Whereas primarily the timber, the stick panelized is all local regulation.
00:27:17.333 --> 00:27:17.708
That's right.
00:27:17.875 --> 00:27:18.458
All local.
00:27:18.915 --> 00:27:19.000
Yeah.
00:27:19.458 --> 00:27:26.040
And that's a big difference in terms of oversight, quality, durability, et cetera.
00:27:26.790 --> 00:27:27.208
Terrific.
00:27:27.375 --> 00:27:27.540
Okay.
00:27:27.750 --> 00:27:31.875
So, so audience, it is confusing.
00:27:32.000 --> 00:27:33.375
I find it very confusing.
00:27:33.375 --> 00:27:36.250
I had to tell myself modular, Bensonwood is modular.
00:27:36.625 --> 00:27:40.708
Tell my brain that in order to, panels to set panels, thank you.
00:27:41.625 --> 00:27:42.875
And offsite construction.
00:27:42.915 --> 00:27:46.915
And so that is, that's important.
00:27:46.915 --> 00:27:48.833
You'll hear more and more about that.
00:27:49.708 --> 00:27:59.125
Well, before we close, I do want to talk a little bit about, you have two lines, you have unity and you have legacy in terms of the lines of the residential side.
00:27:59.458 --> 00:28:03.583
But would you tell us a little bit about commercial and institutional as well?
00:28:03.915 --> 00:28:07.415
Because there's a university right nearby here, a college called Middlesex.
00:28:07.415 --> 00:28:13.208
And I understand there's a lot of Bensonwood in there, but so tell us a little bit about unity and legacy lines.
00:28:13.208 --> 00:28:13.540
Sure.
00:28:14.458 --> 00:28:21.500
So the unity and legacy lines are definitely targeting direct to consumer home sales.
00:28:22.290 --> 00:28:27.750
They are pre-designed homes that are based out of a system.
00:28:28.333 --> 00:28:42.625
They are in separate collections on our website because they were derived from separate systems, but they both offer the same great advantage, which is being able to leverage all the time tested kind of design principles that went into them.
00:28:43.540 --> 00:28:54.415
There's a surprising amount of work that has to go into engineering a home after it's been designed.
00:28:54.750 --> 00:29:10.833
And so when people sort of want to start envisioning their dream home, and they want to take pen to a blank sheet of paper and just start sketching, what you have to realize is that that really freights the project with a lot of additional engineering work, especially in an offsite way.
00:29:11.458 --> 00:29:31.125
If you actually boil your needs down to, it turns out a lot of us have a lot of the same standard needs and actually could achieve a higher quality home, better quality windows, better quality finishes and fixtures inside the home.
00:29:31.708 --> 00:29:41.750
If we would concede to actually leverage
or utilize a pre-design that has already had that engineering baked into it.
00:29:42.500 --> 00:29:45.625
It's a huge value that those designs bring.
00:29:46.333 --> 00:29:48.415
You asked about the multifamily work.
00:29:49.125 --> 00:29:54.750
We currently do not have any pre-designed offerings in the multifamily space.
00:29:55.165 --> 00:30:01.583
So most of the work that we do in that space is custom at a higher price point generally.
00:30:01.708 --> 00:30:06.333
But it balances out because you're getting a higher level of density.
00:30:07.583 --> 00:30:10.583
More people are sharing the same roof and foundation.
00:30:10.958 --> 00:30:17.165
And so your overall costs are amortized better that way.
00:30:18.540 --> 00:30:22.165
We're seeing a huge amount of opportunity right now.
00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:25.625
Well, first you mentioned ADUs, that's one way.
00:30:25.665 --> 00:30:28.083
That's one type of multifamily, right?
00:30:28.083 --> 00:30:30.833
Because you're getting more density on the property.
00:30:31.833 --> 00:30:54.458
But secondly, we're seeing a much higher interest right now in small multifamily of a residential scale, the duplex and triplex and quadplex kind of buildings that can fit into residential neighborhoods and occupy the available sites and still provide people what they want in terms of lifestyle.
00:30:55.333 --> 00:31:02.040
And it's a shared amenity in the sense that the property is occupied more than just a single family.
00:31:03.415 --> 00:31:18.958
That space, the missing middle space is what it's called, is an area that jurisdictions all over the country are identifying as a huge missing piece of what would help overcome the housing crisis right now.
00:31:19.915 --> 00:31:37.540
The affordability crisis has everything to do with the fact that the market either has a single family homes that are out of people's price range or large scale condominium buildings that is just a different lifestyle than people are looking for.
00:31:37.833 --> 00:31:42.875
Whereas it's no different than the apartment style rental living that they are already experiencing.
00:31:43.500 --> 00:31:49.250
So that's where we see the growth, especially in the future happening.
00:31:49.915 --> 00:31:50.500
Terrific.
00:31:50.915 --> 00:31:58.500
Well, and all of this is, I would say emerging out of what we are calling our housing crisis.
00:31:59.208 --> 00:32:05.000
We have every governor, it seems in the country trying to solve this problem for their state.
00:32:05.875 --> 00:32:10.375
Accessory dwelling units, of course, is a recent response for a lot of them.
00:32:10.375 --> 00:32:12.958
And we're seeing a lot of that change over time as well.
00:32:13.500 --> 00:32:17.125
So I congratulate you on the work that you're doing.
00:32:17.250 --> 00:32:21.583
And I know we have so much more that we could talk about and maybe we will in the future.
00:32:22.125 --> 00:32:30.958
And just congratulations on being able to work for an amazing industry right now and at the quality that you are working on.
00:32:31.000 --> 00:32:32.290
And thank you very much.
00:32:32.708 --> 00:32:34.040
Oh, my absolute pleasure.
00:32:34.083 --> 00:32:35.540
Thank you so much for your great questions.
00:32:35.583 --> 00:32:36.250
You're welcome.
00:32:38.333 --> 00:32:40.915
Thank you so much for joining us today.
00:32:40.915 --> 00:32:46.458
And I hope you found this conversation useful to you and your real estate goals.
00:32:47.250 --> 00:32:53.125
You'll find the contact information for our guests and any links they recommend you have in the show notes.
00:32:53.625 --> 00:33:03.208
And should we be able to help you identify some strong real estate professionals in your area, drop us a note at info at realestakeconnectionspodcast.com.
00:33:04.708 --> 00:33:06.208
Thanks again and bye for now.
00:33:06.208 --> 00:33:08.500
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