When Cliff Hanna and his wife, Lana Le, bought a dream lot overlooking Torrey Pines State Reserve, they hired an architect to design a dream home to match.
The trouble was that the price tag came out at $2 million.
“The cost was way too much to build,” Hanna said. “We couldn’t afford it.”
So the couple turned to Hanna’s father, Charles Hanna, a civil engineer who recommended a cheaper construction method: modular housing.
This week, the results of that detour from standard, site-building construction will arrive. A caravan of flatbed trucks will deliver four modules built in Boise, Idaho. A crane will place them on a concrete foundation, constructed over the past six months, in a matter of hours.
Then, over the next three months, Lusk Custom Design & Construction will complete a connecting structure and install the appliances, fixtures and flooring. The Hannas hope to move in by early summer.
Total projected cost: $1,017,000. Time from start to finish: nine months.
Compare that with the 12 months or more it takes to build a comparable custom home and it’s easy to see why modular might be the wave of the future as the U.S. home-building industry shakes off the recession.
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Mobile homes in Del Mar… sacrebleu!
It’s about frigging time we used manufacturing techniques to build houses.
The new custom modular homes have come a long way from the standard double-wides of the past. I did some work around 10th street in Del Mar and I watched a guy put up what looked like a couple of custom modular homes on one lot. Very cool and functional looking modern homes that the current builders couldn’t possibly compete with. I hope that cracker jack box clone architecture becomes a thing of the past.
I really like the modular home concept. You can get better supplies, quality control, and I believe better finished product. But you have to deal with the stigma of a modular home. Which to some people is just not as good as site built.
Someone I know was building college housing units using the same technique a few years ago. The value proposition is pretty compelling from the cost/benefit perspective.
We’ll probably see more of this type of construction over time.
It is compelling for projects with a low number of units.
However, a friend who is president of a top 5 national builder quoted me a construction cost in So Cal of $40/sf for Temecula type product and $65/sf for their ‘upscale’ coastal product…
That is tough to beat…
Silverwood homes (very nice higher end modular maker in Corona, CA) runs +/- $100/sf.
Clearfund,
Those quotes are for building tracts and many homes, right? A person wanting to build a single house would never see that pricing.
According to my hubby (an architect) another advantage of modular construction is seismic. Modular units are designed to handle the vibration/stress of transporting – which helps them handle the vibration/stress of an earthquake. Makes sense to me.
Good point about the size of the run making a difference. My friend’s college housing was just 30 units so modular was a cost saver. This was infill land.
When I was in Texas, we had built just under 20 units at $45 s/f for basic product. One off duplexes ran us around $65 s/f. (prices do not include land)
On the other hand, Fox & Jacobs “most home for the money” (national builder) was selling homes and land for not much more than that due to their economies of scale.
Hey I saw this thing this weekend! It was parked at the entrance to the Sorrento Valley road bike path.
I was wondering what it was.
Daniel, once it’s assembled, can you take a picture of it?
Factory built homes are progressively becoming more popular in Quebec, especially now that the manufacturers can mimic the French Canadian style reasonably well. They still have a bit of a stigma however; the homes built during the Seventies were built just as badly as mobile homes. But today, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between a properly manufactured site built home, and one manufactured in a factory.
I even found the story of a man who ordered a kit home on-line from a North-American manufacturer, and had it delivered in a standard shipping container… to Japan! Apparently, homes built in Japan are so poorly built that they’re pretty much worthless within thirty years. They guy didn’t want to take any chances.