Where Are All the Modular Home Factories Hiding?
I was asked recently how many modular homes are sold in the US every year. Since the number of new home starts for the modular industry hovers around 3% and there were 1,000,000 (yearly adjusted) new home starts in the US in 2019, that would mean 30,000 of them were modular or prefab.
That number is easy. The numbers that are hard to find are how many single family IRC homes were built by modular home factories. There are "statistics" businesses out there that try to put a handle on those numbers but since states vary as to how they calculate that number and some states don’t even require factories to register each home, it gets difficult to be very accurate. Then the factories themselves fluff those numbers.
It’s tough to even try and get an accurate count of the number of factories in the US. Many are large with well known addresses while others are small and build in whatever space is available near their buyers. There are production factories that use an assembly line and there are many small factories that build their modules on piles of sticks and timbers called cribbing.
Then you have the factories that sell through a builder network and many that sell direct to the new home buyer. Are these factories really modular factories or are they just a home builder producing homes for their own customers?
As far as I can determine, there are currently less than 80 operating modular home factories (non-commercial modular factories) in the US. That would have the average factory producing about 7.1 modular IRC homes a week.
But that is not a good number to use. The number of homes that the median factory produces is closer to 2 1/2. I've found some factories still in operation that are hard pressed to build that many a month.
How is our industry going to raise that 3% number to even 4% if we don’t have any idea how some factories can turn out 12 homes a week and others produce less than 30 a year?
Is there a point to all this? I sure hope so but for the life of me I can’t figure it out.
I’m looking for your thoughts on this.
Commodity Trader
4 年Will it be helpful for the industry to focus on unconventional markets and grow big there? Affordable housing overseas can be a big market. This is something we at Richmond International FP (www.rifp.com) can help.? Also, what is the share of prefab construction in commercial construction?
Creating a World Class Team & Manufacturing Facility
4 年We are here in Southern California. Check us at www.connect-homes.com We have an assembly line in our factory. we are completing 2000 sq/ft modular homes now every 6 days. Last house we built only spent 19 days on the line from start to finish. #leanthinking?
Managing Director at Modern Living Solutions
4 年Interesting - is there any stats you can aggregate from the factories you know of to verify? I wonder if it is less than 3%