Episode 40 - Prefab Pod Live Chat on Wildfire Rebuilds, Toby Long of Clever Homes
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Michael Frank, Prefab Review: I think we're good. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the prefab review podcast. And in this case YouTube page or video or whatever. I'm Michael Frank the host, and I'm excited to be joined by Toby Long from Clever Homes. Just a quick note on this. Toby and me have been talking about this for a while, but we're going to do a little bit at least a short series of a couple of these podcasts, trying to demystify certain parts of the prefab, building apparatus, talk about industry issues, answer questions we get a lot.
Toby came to me and said, Hey, I want to do something new as a resource for people in the industry. So hopefully we succeed at that. But please give us feedback and even suggestions for a name for this, because it's all still work in progress. Anyway, Toby, thanks for joining.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, Michael. Thanks. I'm excited. Like you said, I think this is a chance to just share some experiences. I think both of us probably get a lot of similar questions. And I like this notion of demystifying parts of what we've been working on together and collectively for so long.
It's exciting to see the continued evolution of this process. And I think people continue to get really excited about how to apply these types of building strategies to projects. Clearly there's some current topics that I think are going to continue to drive people to explore prefabrication and offsite construction methods.
And I've always felt like a lot of the things I talk about with prospective clients or people that are motivated, at least shared by a lot of people. So hopefully this is a way to create a little repository of additional information to help people continue to think about how this might apply to their projects.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, totally. Just to give everyone a little context on Toby and I. Toby is a true expert in this. Toby can give his bona fides in a second, but he's been one of the leading architects in prefab and modular housing for, whether it's 20 years or more, but longer than I've been in this space.
He can give a little more context in a second, but he is intimately involved in all parts from entitlement, planning, designing and then actually helping on overseeing and working on the construction part. I and this, our site prefab review is not that. We are involved with a tremendous number of projects because we have, hundreds of thousands or millions of users a year and we help them with projects, but we really take the perspective of doing deep research, but also being hyper pragmatic.
So I expect that I'll occasionally push back, but a lot of these conversations will actually be me representing the user and kind of collectively trying to tap into Toby's expertise. With that being said there, we'll do this on a lot of topics, but unfortunately though honestly not unexpectedly, there's another fire in the news.
As I said, prefab review has been around for seven or eight years. And this is at least the third or fourth considerable fire in California alone, where we've had to deal with. There's the Tubbs fire. There's been a bunch of stuff in Wine Country. And now there's been a series of fires in different parts of Los Angeles, particularly in the Pacific Palisades area.
And unsurprisingly there's a lot of motivated people who want to rebuild their house as quickly and beautifully. Cost effectively as possible. So we've been getting a lot of inbound traffic and I know Toby has as well with lots of questions. Yeah, we're going to dive into all things fire rebuild on this podcast.
With that being said, Toby, do you think you can give people a little bit more perspective on your background and your experience with fire rebuilds?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, for sure. And I love Michael that you also have this sort of unique perspective because you are at the front of all of this, I think people that are curious about what this industry is, which surely is something to be curious about.
They find you and they seek you out and they, benefit from your ability to see this community grow and define itself. And I think what we both know from being in this space is there's a lot of variation. There's not a lot of consistency, I think, in how prefabrication is understood.
At least in the United States I don't pretend to have worldview around this. But I think, in the. Yes. This has been a frothy churning kind of community that's tried to define itself for a long time. And certainly it's been fun to participate in this kind of renaissance moment. But being at the very front, understanding the market at large is a unique perspective.
So I hope through some of this banter that I get to ask you some questions too, because my perspective is important, but also, in a different moment where I think people have understood to some extent how these ideas and these concepts for building may apply to what they're doing and have understood to some extent where these resources live.
And then they can start to talk more specifically with me and, of course, other colleagues and cohorts in our space who have, equal and meaningful contributions as well. So like you said, a little background, I'm an architect. I'm a licensed architect. I grew up in architecture.
Pennsylvania nerdy kid, stepfather was a builder, found my way into this industry as a teenager been around it most of my life. I trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, moved out to California after school and really tried to build a practice from an early point in Professional life that was driven to things that were a little maybe less conventional, started in green building, quickly found our way into the offsite space.
And I've formed up a company and a bit of a brand working with clients on various forms of prefabrication. My sort of process is a little different because I work as an architect. We are there to help people understand different, Construction methods and technologies. We have expertise in modular building and panelized construction, even traditional construction as steel is finding its way into the marketplace might be a topic to discuss at some point.
But we, are there to help our clients from beginning to end. It has built a knowledge base of sorts, maybe some gray hair here around what it takes to be successful with building projects that involve factory partners in all their various forms. Obviously there's a big piece of this experience, which is not related to the building, and this is important for people to understand, site work, infrastructure, utilities all these things are important topics. And fire rebuilding projects also have some uniqueness, which I think is worthy to discuss or to try to understand. And then, of course, how to engage with factory partners and what the industry looks like in the kind of nature of these relationships are all things that we bring our clients through and.
Try to help people find each other in this space and ultimately put together all the details and information that's really required to have successful building projects. It's been an interesting journey to explore our space and, our place in this industry.
And I come at it through design, so my work is a little bit more I don't know, tailored, in some way to our clients needs and goals. That's not novel unto itself, but does, have a slightly different relationship to some of the more transactional models of selling buildings and utilizing prototypical designs, all of which is an important part of the industry, and, again, creates this sort of wide perspective of how prefabrication is applicable, which I love that you wrap your arms around and help people try to discover the right people and the right methods to engage with the industry.
Yeah, just a little bit back story there, but that hopefully lays a little groundwork and provide some context for things that we can talk about.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Perfect. Okay, so from an agenda perspective this is what I'm thinking. Tell me if you think this is okay, Toby. So Toby on his website, which hopefully you all can see.
But if not, it's Clever Homes. Just look up Clever Homes, Toby Long and you'll find the projects. Toby has a number of projects. There are fire rebuilds partly because I think it just increases credibility, but it makes it a little more tangible. I want to go through one of those three projects right now.
Then I'm hoping after that we can run through my kind of FAQs, the stuff that we're getting in through our site, the stuff I would, recommend to my mom if her home burned down. And then we can see if we have time for the other ones.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Your mom's neighbor.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: My mom's neighbor. Yes. My aunt. Okay. Yeah let's dive into this. So you tipped me off ahead of time. Hey, here's some projects where I've, worked on fire rebuilds in the past. So I've got the Santa Rosa project one up if that's okay, but maybe you can talk through and, provide some current info.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, it's a good starting point. So this is a project that is located in a community called Fountain Grove that now has some notoriety. This was a community that was really devastated by the Tubbs fire. I should have prepped. I don't exactly remember what year I want to say. 2017, 2018.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Sounds about right.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. Yeah. Pretty devastating fire. I don't think it's fair to compare fires. That's probably something we would avoid. But a lot of people lost their homes as we're now seeing in Los Angeles. Slightly different in that this was a community that was a little bit less dense than both Palisades and Altadena.
It wasn't so much structure fires adjacent to each other but was very much driven by a similar circumstance of high winds. I believe the start of the fire may have been PG & E or may have been electrical wires. I'm speaking a little out of turn here. So hopefully people correct us in the comments.
But anyway, this was a project that we were invited to help our clients rebuild from their loss. Interestingly, most of the projects that I've worked on were at least two of them in particular in the Santa Rosa and Sonoma County areas. Our clients had motivation to try to really recreate the house they lost which in some ways and maybe to the FAQ section of this, does play into permitting and plays into kind of the resiliency programs, or at least that's how Sonoma County was defining it as they created a department, which was specific for the approvals for building permits for fire reconstructed property.
But one of these categories, and I think we're gonna see this in Los Angeles, is gonna be related to rebuilding kind of the house that was lost. I think there's a little bit of an opportunity, I choose words carefully maybe because of the nature of these types of conversations, the people have lost homes, but to the extent there is an opportunity to build, a home which has better R values or is more resilient or whatever.
But I think in terms of, this project in particular, my client was really motivated to try to replace the building. Now interestingly, as you can see here, this doesn't look like a modular geometry, right? This is not a square building that we just dropped some boxes around.
So we had to work closely with our client to really understand how to leverage offsite construction practices and how to manage some of their expectations for both the plan geometry and this sort of bent, shaped kind of courtyard for plan - you can see those lounge chairs in the middle of outdoor space. The house kind of bends around the site around the property a little bit. And then how to also capture their imagination for the architecture of the home, which was slightly different. So I do think there's a subtle distinction here Michael, that may emerge in all of our conversations about reconstruction, where you rebuild the site.
As it was or you rebuild the plan like the floor plan as it was and then do you also rebuild the style or the architecture as it was. I think people are going to judge each of those a little differently. As far as I understand, and our experiences go we didn't really see restrictions emerge around architecture. There were restrictions around
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Where you're usually stay within about the same envelope in the same. There's a kind of leniency around
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Styles. Exactly. It's like where it goes on the site and how big it is and where you gain access and that kind of stuff. But, if you made your house modern or you went more traditional or you brought a vernacular, I think for the most part, there's little controls around that or maybe even a little concern around that.
And, we can judge it and we can be critical of that. As people will be, but I think that, may also present this sort of opportunity in some way to reimagine the building. So that was really much the case here. Our clients, unfortunately had been through some recent remodels and really made some improvements in this home.
And we we're asked to map that against a modular geometry and a relationship to offsite construction so that we could build this project as a fully modular assembly which is what we're seeing here. But then we dosed that with this idea for architecture and how the roof lines work and some of the expressive timbers and structural elements that kind of characterize the look and feel of the building.
Of course, the exterior of the project was, important for us to understand. And to try to build the resiliency requirements that our client had. And of course, that the building code now requires of new structures. So that kind of came to be. Now, this also had unique site conditions, which is another thing that we can talk about quickly is just what happens to the site, right?
Are you cleaning it up? And so we did need to deal with the change in topography. The site was actually lowered a bit after the cleaning. There's a lot of soil that's contaminated. The driveway access was too steep for their preferences. So we actually reimagined how we were going to sit on this little knoll that The existing home was on, but this is a good example of just a home that was rebuilt on the same place, essentially with the same plan geometry but working through a different construction method than just simply site built
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: I have a bunch of questions here. And by the way, that's a beautiful house. It looks like you did a great job. So kudos on that. Definitely think the butterfly roof is cool. Okay, so a bunch of questions. One when did you get involved? Did you get involved right after the fire? Had there already been like a year of site cleanup or something to that effect to make the site even ready for pre construction?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: More or less right away. I think that it will benefit people to have some professional guidance as they work through these early stages. I want to convey to people that as hard as it may be to hear, patience is important in this process because there's a lot of moving pieces in some ways familiar to construction, in other ways quite different.
So we got involved basically right as the property was being cleaned. Yeah. Most of Fountain Grove was cleaned up by FEMA.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: I was about to ask was it FEMA or was it some kind of private contract?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, there were sort of two options, right? There's, you can hire people, they'll do it, you can do it yourself or FEMA will come in and clean up and then you get it.
This was done by FEMA, I believe. This was cleaned up by the government. Yeah. They were moving through the neighborhoods and cleaning and then testing the soil. It was built in that and to make sure that, what you're building on doesn't have contaminants, as cervical.
So that's what we got involved. And I don't know that we influenced like how it was cleaned or how much was removed. That was very logistic, but we certainly started to tease out some of the early considerations for the project at a conceptual level so that when the property was ready to be rebuilt we could move into that pretty quickly.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: So then we're first steps, the standards, get a new survey, get a new geotech, et cetera.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, to touch this sort of what do people expect of this process, sometimes folks don't really understand that while we will see relief on permitting and fees and timelines and all of that kind of stuff, buildings in California are obligated to be constructed to current code standards. And the process for rebuilding will involve a similar and familiar set of steps.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Did they waive Title 24 in this situation? I forgot if they did that or not.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: No, it's still a requirement under the building code and the energy code that we meet those requirements.
And maybe I'll you know, eat my words later that there will be some changes to this. Sometimes there's yeah, we didn't see it here. It was still obliged to meet the current code where cycle and to meet all of the standards of the local community.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Sorry, just so everyone understands Title 24.
I'm going to do a terrible job of explaining. It's a set of standards for a new home construction in California. It includes, most homes having to have solar that basically offsets the energy needs of that. So it's essentially a net zero home. And I think there's a number of other standards involved as well.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, it covers a variety of building requirements. One of which is energy compliance. And so through mathematical models that are authored by the state, we plug in a bunch of variables about, the house and the windows and the doors and the envelopes and the heating and cooling systems and the way you heat domestic water and it comes up with the right compliance criteria and we meet that for all new buildings in California.
It's not particularly rigorous per se. But it definitely influences the kinds of decisions we make about design and specification. So there are some obligations there. You can see the modest solar panels there on this house. Yeah, as a result of the requirements. I think they'll expand this as time goes on.
But we have a decent array that was placed onto the building. But yeah, to get back to your point. The first thing is your house creates this sort of toxic problem in the soil. And then we remove that soil and that inevitably changes the relationship of the site. There's also, the interface between the building and the public infrastructure, in all of the homes in Los Angeles, we have sidewalks, we've got curb cuts, we've got utility connections, we've got water lines and sewer lines and things that did survive the fire that we're going to plug into and all of this creates important information for us to understand when you design an engineered building, we need to know how all those things connect with each other.
So the first thing is you get the site survey done, which is an important thing to really understand, because I think that's going to be a valuable resource for people in the Los Angeles area and really can't happen until you've got the site clean and geoteched.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: All right. Quick guidance, because everyone's going to ask this, generally a local civil engineer will do those types of things or, and I'd say costs on that kind of thing vary a little bit, but I'd say you're probably looking at a couple thousand dollars to $10,000 per thing, depending on the complexity of the site, is that basically it?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: That's what I see in the market more or less.
Yeah. And I think that there's a variety of models for this. Like surveying is a licensed trade craft in California, civil engineers often perform land surveying services.
There are also standalone surveyors. There's no requirement to be a local person, which I think is going to be ongoing kind of from Los Angeles, Houston, or wherever licenses there's sort of two functions of this. You've got the boundary, so just where is the property line in the world that comes from legal, deed, deed language and how lots have been created in the state.
There's some complexity there that might be another good podcast talk about just the creation of lots and certificate of compliance and these kinds of things people may hear about as you wander into this conversation. And then there's topography, which of course is the obvious relationship of the land forms now changed by the cleanup.
I also group topography with other natural and built features. So just where are the old fences, where's the sidewalk, where's the utility cleanouts, various things that are also part of that physical environment that get put together with the boundary to create a really accurate map that we can use to then design and engineer buildings.
And I think your pricing is generally there. I think more or less land surveying seems to fit into a $3,000 to $5,000 kind of zone for kind of urban infill style lots and reliable monuments that can be used to find those boundaries to something much more expensive as you get into the hills.
And now we've got acreage or you've got less reliable boundaries and the surveyors need to do more work. But I think that's a fair approximation. A quick interesting thing that may emerge here on this question of survey, not to get off topic here, but a lot of rural properties get surveyed using like lasers from planes.
You can do like LIDAR surveys there. You can fly over and take pictures of the ground. And if you've got lots of acres that's an easy way to create a map of the site. I don't know that people should expect that for some of these suburban lots. More or less, that's the guys out with the fluorescent vests and the poles and it's all digitized now and GPS.
But probably doing disservice to the surveyor craft. But more or less it's an onsite kind of thing. And it usually takes surveyors about a day to do the reconnaissance in the field, and then usually there's a week or two about putting together the CAD files in a computer environment.
So something people will understand as they start to wander into the world of surveying, something architects can help with as we tap our networks, but there's also a whole industry around this too, that's pretty easy to access.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Let's get into some specifics on, we can either do this house or you can give me sort of general answers on your portfolio of three or four of these fire builds that you've done.
So timing wise, and I understand this varies a little bit from project to project. What in this specific situation or in your portfolio were you seeing in terms of time to design the house time for permitting and then the different aspects of the construction part period.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. I think there's a faster version.
That's right. And not to speak to specifics, but I think that in terms of the faster side of this, I think that, the kind of prototypical models where people can source buildings from fabricators that they can plop down is going to be a pretty fast way to do this.
It may lead to other questions about tying in some of the site relationships. That's something we could talk about. And obviously manufacturers and fabricators that have a more transactional model have different ways of providing or not providing some of those resources. But I think you've got that fast version, I would probably expect that's, all but, a month of work or so that people would be able to access pre existing designs and it's important to understand that there's still a little bit of engineering that happens for buildings. Like you mentioned, Title 24 is a process that looks at North, South, East, West. So even taking prototypical things and placing them down still has a little bit of follow through to make sure that the building is going to be appropriate or compliant for the particular property.
In our work, we look at this as, like fast track or something that's a little bit more careful and considered. And that's just a judgment. On a fast track level, it's not unreasonable to think that we could, design a house in a month or so that you could come up with the engineering in another month or so.
Sometimes that will rub up against the challenges of budget planning, which it involves builders and other partners that may want a little bit more space to work through some of those questions. And then I think, on the fast that you could do a project in two, three months, I think that's realistic for people that are moving
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: quickly.
Quick, just to be clear, are we saying two to three months for a custom designed house from someone like Toby, who's obviously doing really high end work? Relative to maybe a little bit shorter if you're using a company for, I can't think about a good example of like a company that's historically let's look at Connect Homes or something like that, where you're taking a pre designed plan that's hopefully been built before that you can look at a rendering or ideally, and already, in the ground home on, and they're really just doing some kind of light specification to your house. Honomobo, another example that I think still exists. Yeah,
Toby Long, Clever Homes: I think a systematized approach, which is how we work, because the work's built around a specific construction process, may provide a certain acceleration.
I think people that are going to work with a local architect just do conventional building projects there might be a little bit more time involved because of just the nature of discovering the decisions that would go with the project of how to recreate the architecture. I think that's also a little different, Michael, if you're going to try to recreate the house that was there, as a starting point, versus trying to do something, which is entirely new that you may want to discover the architecture. I think that's going to take a little bit more.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: So before our break you were talking about timing and you were talking about how on a design basis, we typically we'll see, a couple of months in terms of design and engineering for a beautiful custom home like this and then what do you, what did you end up seeing in this scenario, which isn't completely analogous but a little bit analogous in terms of the speed of permitting and entitlements on this project or these projects in wine country?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, I think that's fair, Michael. I think that, like I said, there's going to be different tracks, different motivations people will find, and the timing to get through engineering will vary for folks as they look at different solutions. I do think permitting is going to be pretty consistent for everybody, more or less regardless of what you're proposing.
There's not existing records that we're working off of. These are all, 2025, 2026, 2027 buildings that will go through a review, if you will, with regard to compliance. But for the rebuilding that's been taking place in most of the areas we've been working a lot of the permit requirements just all but, went away.
A lot of the enforcement actions are being pushed to the field instead of on paper. What we did see in the Sonoma and Napa projects was controls around septic and well systems. So there was a little bit of demonstration that the infrastructure was still adequate. This is going to be different for Los Angeles.
Obviously, being in some municipal systems is going to be a little bit of a relief of having to propose or provide information about the adequacy of those connections. But these permits were, all but two weeks. It's a submittal that went in. I think this was on paper. It will all be digital for the next submissions that are going to be taking place in Los Angeles.
At least that's my expectation. They'll all be digital. And so usually there's a quick review that the documents contain the necessary information and it wasn't a review for compliance or a review for detail, but just that you had a site plan, there's a foundation plan, there's the floor plans, there's some electrical information, an assembly detail, some structural drawings, of course.
And then it will vary for the rest of it. If it's a modular building, it will be very detailed in this nature. If people were building traditionally, they'll get some relief on mechanical systems and other kinds of design build opportunities. But I think we saw like a week of submission and then, we may have had a comment or two that comes back mostly about completeness within the package and then they would issue the permit.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Then you're saying the building permit.
Wait, so just so people understand, that's impressive to me. I'd say on our typical project in a tony neighborhood like this or Palisades in a non fire scenario, I would say fast would be two or three months and median to slow could be six to nine maybe five to nine. I don't know, something like that.
So that's actually quite fast. And then, yeah, sorry.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Los Angeles is a rigorous place. All of our work through the every part of Southern California has been pretty difficult. Big city, lots of moving pieces obviously some, jurisdictional controls that are a little smaller throughout L.A. that have different experiences. But from the city to the county in particular pretty rigorous and lengthy process. And so I think the acceleration that we're going to see is a very much needed moment of this process for sure to get people back on their feet pretty quickly.
Yeah, dramatic adjustment. And then the fees are usually waived both for permit fees. Also in terms of school fees, the road, I can see this all the way. I think we may have had a modest fee that just went into some level of processing, but it was very small. Hundreds, not thousands or tens. And so for this project in particular, and this may happen in other places this is a community.
It does have an HOA, right?
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: So there was some design review as there?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: It was an HOA process that was formed around it, but it happened in one meeting. There wasn't really a review. We just sat down with the HOA representatives that were responsible for managing the process. A little bit of a page turned through the drawings, looked Q& A on some aspects of the project.
At least all of our projects were basically through, in that hour that we had with the HOA. I think it was there.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: You didn't have to do a letter writing campaign or whatever?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, exactly no political consultants were involved.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: And then yeah, and then let's talk about, so these were modular homes? So I think of this sort of modular process as twofold, right? There's the queue, right? Which is these, some of these modular companies start to get backed up, right? So sometimes you have a year wait on some of them and then there's like the actual process, which I. Usually I've seen take a couple months, but what did you see in these scenarios?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. So I think the fabrication schedule for this project was probably about four to five months. And so relatively fast, this project has some, some unique detailing four to five months in the factory. In the factory. Yeah. And then, we had a kind of ramp quickly that went into the building of the site.
Foundation work went pretty fast, getting the cripple walls in place. I know getting the mods delivered was pretty quick. What happens after that for everybody's benefit? It our knowledge is a little bit more of a traditional kind of experience. Once you have modular buildings that are set onto the foundation, we start going back into kind of a critical path schedule with trades coming in, doing their various disciplines and, getting things ready to go.
What took this project a little longer was just rebuilding the landscaping. Still growing in, obviously, in these photos that were taken fairly after, fairly close after the owners moved in. But just getting the flat work in, getting the plantings in place. There's some seasonal relationships, certainly in northern California, that impact that a little bit.
We also had a decent amount of work that was taking place on site. And so the eave constructions all get built on site. This project also has a low level kind of basement ADU sort of thing that was an open space that we built on site. So there were still some things that happened on site.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: You built the garage on site?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: The garage portion was built on site.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Oftentimes that happens a lot with prefab.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: It really makes sense. Yeah, we've done a few kind of modules.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Or else you'll do the kits offsite and then install them.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, right. Or we'll drag the mod boundary like across the garage and try to pick up part of it. Yeah, it comes down to cost benefit analysis on whether or not we're spending too much on framing or transportation costs for a space that's not particularly utility intense, but yeah, the project went relatively quickly through most of the building portions of it. And then, the stuff that happens after you start building out the landscaping and hardscape work will just follow its own schedule.
These guys were a little bit more intimately involved in it just for what it's worth, because I think people will pick up on it. So this project obviously has some resiliency built into it, which is visible in some of these materials. It also does use wood.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: And I was going to say , I just built a house, by the way, in a fairly high fire risk area. And I lost the battle with my wife about whether we use Cedar or not. So we also used, this looks like some kind of clear Cedar or something on the outside. What which, it looks beautiful, but tell me about the decision to do that versus, use maybe a less flammable material.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: For sure. Personal choices, right? This is the kind of architecture, the way people feel about the project looking for in their rebuilding process. I, think having the experience of Palisades, maybe a little different from people that were on acreage that lost land your perspective on what fire is might be a little bit different.
Obviously the outcome is similar. But this was, this is wood that, does have requirements for maintenance. A ll of the wood is built on a fire sheathing, right? So this is required by code and, provide some elements of resiliency. So all of this is on top of a non combustible board.
There's various ways to do it, but mostly involves sheet rock or a cementitious material that is underneath the wood siding. All of the elements which are exposed are timber in nature, so they have minimum dimensions. It's usually four inches, which allows it to largely be noncombustible. The eave construction of this building also was really important for our clients to have the softness of wood underneath the roof.
So that's all also built on top of fire sheathing. That provides a little bit of the resiliency. The rest of the materials of the project are non combustible, so it uses a lot of stucco and metal paneling all of which, provide a little bit of resistance to fire. And of course, all of the project's openings are either closed off, so we use a lot of closed cell foam to avoid venting into the roof structures or for crawl spaces, right? To try to close them off and seal them. Or we use a technology which is essentially an ember proof vent that kind of melts itself shut when it's exposed to heat which prevents the ember intrusion, which is so common in older homes and really created a lot of the problems that we've been seeing.
Yeah. And then I know the answer to this, but just because we obviously do a lot with a lot of the same factories that probably built this home.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: S o for a really beautiful high end home like this, what do we, what do you end up seeing from a cost perspective? And I think a lot of times the way I think about this is breaking this down so it's most relatable as like breaking down on the cost of the mods, the cost of the site work, et cetera, et cetera.
Again what we're seeing these days, I don't know if it's what you're seeing is like high end mods are pretty expensive, like $300 a square foot. I don't know if that's the range that you're seeing, but that's what we're seeing. Is that kind of similar?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, I'd break it maybe into just these sort of chunks that I I'd be a part of, right?
I think there is a market that's serving this, so obviously there's an inexpensive version of our world.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yes, there's Champion and companies. There are mass market and more typically built to manufactured spec, not modular spec.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: They don't have design elements, and that's great, and that's going to serve a big market. It always has and will continue to do and there's the others that are trying to get into this a little differently. So I think there is a version of projects like this that are getting to lower specification, being a little bit more modest with some of the design and specifications in the project.
And I think you can see this in kind of a $250 to $300 a square foot kind of industry, what they call freight on board, right? FOB kind of app factory. I think the really healthy market right now in the modular space is in this $300 to $350 a square foot kind of chunk, which is where we see some design elements. We see a little bit higher specification scale helps, smaller homes.
I think people need to realize it sometimes costs more per square foot because bathrooms, et cetera, are expensive. So yeah, you got to build the kitchen. You have to do your bathrooms. And you've only got a thousand square feet to do it on that ends up looking more expensive than a 2000 square foot home with the same bathrooms and the same kitchen. So I think there's a little bit of that. I think there's a healthy market, which is this sort of $350 to $400 square foot zone, which is really where you start to get into a higher degree of finish, more cabinets different HVAC systems, better quality doors and windows.
I think it starts to push over $400, that $400, $450 a square foot modular building really starts to touch kind of the high end of the market. That's where we see a lot of the really nice specifications.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: You are talking about the mod costs alone?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, just where does that live?
And I think you're doing rough justice on this. So at least in my experience, probably, it's about a 50, 50 investment for the most part.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: You're saying site costs are about the same. So yeah, so you're saying if you do a $400 I see site costs just incredibly variant based on the complexity of the site also meaning this site that's fairly hilly is probably a lot more challenging.
And this also looks like it is more challenging tha n some of the urban infill stuff. Yeah.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. And I think this is going to bear out, across Los Angeles too in its current moment. And I think some of the infill stuff is going to be pretty straightforward because the infrastructure is hopefully more or less intact, or at least, that's ready to plug into, we don't have to do a lot of grading, you've already got curb cuts and you've got things that are in the public domain that are already dealt with.
So I think that's going to be beneficial to people for sure. But I think more or less I advise.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: So we're saying the math is $600 to $800 a square foot on hard costs before soft costs. Is that right?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: I look at it as the modular budget and then everything else. I think that's where this breaks around this 50 50 investment and to see about 50 percent of the costs going offsite.
We said about 50 percent of the costs in the everything else bucket. And I incorporate soft costs into that where you've got low permit fees inside. I think that's right. And I think if somebody's building a, a $300 a square foot modular project, I think you're gonna see a total budget that's five to $600 a square foot.
Yeah. If you're gonna build a $400, $450 a square foot module, you're gonna see an $800, $900 square foot, kind of investment. And it's just gonna measure out not only in site work, but also amenities. We see a lot of costs going into swimming pools and outdoor kitchens and spa and landscaping alone, which is gonna be an important part of reconstruction for sure, and something that people shouldn't underestimate. So I think that's again, a rough, justice estimate. I think you get this spread this, $250 to $450. That's a pretty wide range, but I think that's where the modular world lives.
I think once you go below this, you're getting into that higher volume stuff. I think once you go above that, I think people start to look at whether or not off site construction is even the right thing to do. There's different options available to people. That's what I see in the market and where we help our clients fit on the spectrum.
More or less, most of our projects are in this $300, $350 a square foot kind of target is what we're aiming towards and then people will bend it north or bend it south depending upon different preferences.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That makes sense. Okay. So now just going away from this project and more specifically towards what are the kind of sort of short form FAQs that whatever I'd want to tell my unfortunate aunt or, someone coming to our site who has these earnest questions.
We're telling everyone, tell me what we should add, who comes to our site right now, get your insurance claims in, if that's going to be variable in figuring out your budget. If you're really gung ho on figuring out design at this moment before even understanding the timing on getting your site cleared, get to the extent your like house, like in this case, has been renovated recently and probably already has some kind of existing survey.
Because again I'm not even honestly positive if people, if surveys are allowed on land at this moment, it probably will be. If you could at least get an old survey that probably provides a lot of helpful stuff in terms of being able to start to get designs together.
What else do you think we should be giving people as really fast actionable advice right now?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. I look at this as like the three different investments we make into building projects like Financial, intellectual, and emotional. And I think there's different ways of approaching each one of those, right?
Obviously the financial side, you're speaking to it now. It's just get ready for the investment or reinvestment into the property insurance companies. I don't underestimate what's involved in that. And I have deep empathy for people going through that negotiation. I'm sure there's some that are easier and some that are harder.
I hope everybody manages to find their way through that. I think the intellectual part is really just preparing for what you need to do, right? So this is getting back into cleaning a lot, getting it surveyed. Geotechnical analysis is something that has to be done on all sites to prepare information to design the foundation.
Also in the same kind of investment category as the survey itself. So about the same order of magnitude, about the same amount of time, more or less. We'll see how this shakes out also a licensed trade craft in California and doesn't require local people per se. So I think as we stretch our arms, we can start to find resources throughout the state that will be able to help.
But I think that's the two kind of important pieces of this to some extent, understanding the utility conditions can be really critical to help people plan for their expectations. And I don't underestimate what, So Cal Edison and some of these other utilities are going to have to go through to get things done.
I am interested to see, as we've been talking about, do you underground all these lines?
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: I expect everything's gonna be grounded, right? Like if stuff's burned out already, right?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: I would think so. It's all crispy, right? So I think it's gotta go below grade, but that's gonna take time to figure out. Really it's the survey that geotech and the utility assessment, which I think are the three things to generally prepare for in this intellectual way. And the emotional investment is going to be hard for everybody for sure. I think the urgency to understand reconstruction is really high.
I think starting to dabble in concepts or beginning to understand the architectural side of the project is a place to begin to invest. I would encourage people to do the inspiration finding and understand what kind of home is going to be rebuilt. And I see it as like the opportunity you didn't ask for but I think part of the emotional element to this is trying to find the new house and try to get excited about that however possible.
And so I think, but I also think that patience is important because a lot of these other elements do need to take shape before people are ultimately going to move into the house. So I think, in the short form, it's really survey, geotech, and trying to understand the condition for the utilities.
In some regards people that have trees that are remaining on site, I would probably put an arborist into that same category. So doing an arborist consultation to determine if a signature tree is worth keeping. Surprisingly, some trees do quite well in fire. Oaks in particular have some resiliency. I think palms and pines, people are going to question given what's happened, certainly in Southern California.
But maybe putting an arborist into that same category to just understand if that becomes an element that you would design around or work around or just prepare to remove. But I think those are the good first investments. And then of course, I know everybody's going to be trying to build networks and reach out to friends and family and colleagues to try to understand, who are the builders and how do I connect with them and what's that timing look like and, hopefully architects are going to be able to participate in some of that network building as well.
So I think the architectural community is going to be a place for people to lean on to try to get good guidance on how to really prepare themselves for the launch into the new project.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: In terms of building a team so what are the components, whether it's a GC, an architect, a modular, like, how would you think about the priority there? And yeah, how did I think through that?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: I do think, I'm assuming I'm coming at this from a slightly biased position that, architects are going to be central to this. I've always told my clients that, I think architects know, a little bit about a lot of things.
There's a lot of things we don't know, but I think we're a great hub of information to, find answers and to help people come together around building projects. Reaching out to the AIA, reaching out to other architectural organizations is a lot of this in Los Angeles is a good place to start.
I think from an architect, we can start to understand the others around us, but certainly you've got a design team. I would not underestimate, although it's not maybe the priority profession, but interior design is a rigorous process, as for building your house and sometimes trying for people to really understand interiors.
But there's a little bit of that can also come through architecture from a really technical perspective. You've got an architect or a designer. A structural engineer is going to be, of course, quite important in a project. There are mechanical, electrical, and plumbing trades that also can come to bear. Certainly for modular building, this is an important part of the team.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Do you see homeowners being involved? My experience is typically homeowners are not the person recruiting those people. And it's usually the builder or the architect who has established relationships with people.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: I think so. I think so. Yeah, I think so. And sometimes it comes through subcontractors. It's more of a design build process. But I think structural engineers maybe are a little bit different. I think people have a sort of awareness potentially of who engineers are, but I think you've got your building team, right?
Architects, structural MEP. It's important. People know you're going to have fire sprinklers in your house. It's not a bad thing. But that's required under the building codes now, and then there's the site group, right? And so you've got your surveyor and your civil engineer your geotechnical engineer and a landscape architect, is going to be important.
There are water efficiency requirements under the code. So having some awareness of landscaping is important. And I think the consultation on what we're calling fire-scaping is a worthy topic to understand how to build a resilient landscape for our ever changing climate. And so this is the group, right, that's going to be involved in the project. If you can manage it yourself, or if you've got motivation to reach out, I think that sort of becomes the team that you're going to put together. I think more or less, as you're saying, it's going to come through the hub of architects and architecture and design firms that will be able to help obviously different manufacturers and fabricators have different relationships to that process and some support it. Others don't. And so that will just be something people will talk about as they discover, potential building partners. And I think a general contractor like you said Michael are really great source as well. Of course they're going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the building project, both, onsite for modular projects after they're delivered and trying to understand their network is a really great thing to know. Builders have a lot of folks in their whatever, Rolodex.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: How would you think about this? So one of the things that I get a little concerned about it on behalf of clients is I call it getting queued. Which is, hey, you become path dependent on someone who gets really busy. And then you have a deposit with someone where you're just in line.
So meaning name your high end construct like modular builder, let's say Method, right? I don't know exactly what their queue is. You probably do, but let's just say it's eight months right now. It would not surprise me at all if that gets considerably longer than that over the next year as a lot of other high end modular architects start sending them their projects, obviously, like that can be understandable, but also difficult if you were like, hey, I was planning on moving in here in a year and we can't even get into the factory for 10 months longer than I was originally hoping. Are there some tactics to mitigate that? Which is right, like part of the argument for using architects that you get to play the field a little bit more on this stuff. But yeah, how do you think about that? And I think the same thing honestly applies to general contractors if they're not kind of paper general contractors but if they're actually like bringing on a small team of carpenters or something like that.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, I think it's not hard to understand, but I think there's a few.
One is just, patience, that's easy to say, hard to do, but just understanding that people are going to be busy. And I do think that working with the people that you trust or want to trust or that you believe are the right partners is probably important enough to say that having a little bit of a cue is okay. I don't know that I would recommend to people that we work with fabricators that we don't like only for schedule and having a longer project, even if you're dealing with things after the fact or more in the field of change orders. Exactly. Having a quality builder is really important.
I think, so patients, I think proaction is really critical. I think it's just representing who you are. Try to be introduced to these entities, get engaged in pre construction processes is super important. We advocate for pre construction relationships in all of the projects that we work on.
I think a big part of the value I bring to our projects is just understanding the cues in the industry. People are busy. That is true. The timing is critical of knowing how to intersect them and when. I do think people should be careful about really big deposits that go into companies that don't have availability right away.
We've already seen in some companies that there are people that get caught in the teeth of that doesn't come to bear. It can be challenging to get deposits back from people if you change your mind. So I think people need to be careful about that. Obviously that's for fabricators to sell through.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Oh, just a quick interjection on that, everyone. We can do another bigger session on that. I think partly what he's referring to is there's been quite a lot of companies, oftentimes they're venture backed companies, they're in the modular space that have had less than whatever the opposite of not messy is, that have had messy dissolvement processes where you've had individual stories of customers like, okay, basically putting in considerable deposits because of the way the modular draw system works, you oftentimes fund stuff before it gets built.
And then honestly, like not getting their stuff back and being in various forms of like ugly legal action. Trying to avoid that as much as you can, we'll get more into details on how you might be able to do that later, but it's not an easy thing.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, I think that's right. And then this might sound a little funny, but I also think that people shouldn't be hesitant to challenge the cue.
One of the things that we know about the modular space is that it is not super predictable, certainly factories, and people get excited and it looks like a big thing. And then all of a sudden that next project that you were going to do as a factory goes away for any number of reasons.
And so the permit takes longer, the HOA had concerns, the client needed to see a lower interest rate. Who knows? And so those spots open up. And so there is a little bit of being opportunistic. I think that can play into this space. So just making yourself present, making yourself known. Making sure that the industry is aware that you're motivated, you're out there.
That's the advocacy that we try to bring to our projects is just, helping the community understand that these are people that are ready to go and are going to try to seize an opportunity. And every now and then I'll get a call from, so and so factory that says, " Hey, we just had a client drop out. Do you have anything that's ready to build?" And, factories are operating on this very flow like process, the house goes out the door, the next one's coming in and, anytime you've got empty square footage on the factory floor that's just burn on the companies revenues.
I think there's a little bit of that, that people should be mindful of. I don't want to oversell it, but I just found that the opportunities are sometimes a little bit more present than the people may think.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: A couple of quick things I wanted to add on costs. I realized we didn't talk much. One thing wrapped in, if you do modular, you typically are going to have a transport costs and crane costs of the module. Quick, you can probably provide better info than I can. $20k ish for a crane is not crazy and I guess probably , again, depends on the distance, the size of the mods, et cetera. But a lot of times we'll see $50 to a $100 dollars, maybe even a little more per square foot for shipping mods. Is that about what you're seeing?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. The metrics that I like are $10 to $15 a mile per box. Though, people can project a little bit obviously as we start getting far away, that becomes a significant issue for modular building. And I think people will judge the value proposition. If my transportation costs start to get really, six digits starts to sound a little heavy. Obviously that's going to put a strong emphasis on, there's a number of factories in the Riverside, California, San Bernardino area.
That's going to put an emphasis and pressure on people that are regional. That's true. Any building project. Then so I think we're going to start to see, those cues are going to start to fill. And I think there's going to be some entrepreneurship that continues to show up. We're talking a lot to a lot of people about that there's people that are really motivated to try to serve these rebuilding markets. That seems positive. That may also be a little challenge because working with new companies, again, another topic, might have some unique characteristics in terms of how people outreach and introduce themselves and become familiar with those operations.
But I think 10 to 15 bucks a mile is realistic. I think in the current market, obviously it will fluctuate with oil costs, et cetera. But I think that's real. And then I'm in the same way. I think usually advocating it's about a $10,000 to $15,000 investment for most cranes that are going to set modules within a month. Small buildings can sometimes go less than that, but people have to understand that cranes are sold by the hour. And the rigging of the crane, maybe another topic on logistics someday, the rigging of the crane takes a lot of time. And so even if you've got a small box, it's likely that you're going to have a crane there for half a day at the minimum, and that can be a fairly expensive proposition as a metric, more or less, I expect that we're going to try to set between six to eight boxes in a day. Eight's really pushing it, but with a good set crew and a reasonable design, that's very, possible. Some multifamily guys will go even faster than that, but I think that's reasonable for people to expect. And we can talk about the modular breakdown and how to do some math on this maybe as another topic.
But I think those are reasonable expectations people should have about this process and about what would be required in order to have the logistics.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Make sense. Yeah. I guess one last or two last quick topics, I guess one thing is, do you have a quick answer on thinking through, again, me and Toby both want most people to build whatever makes the most sense for them. It's not we're fans of prefab and offsite construction techniques, but there's a lot of different ones. How do you think about the decision to do like a stick built site, built home, a modular, a kit home, et cetera?
Toby Long, Clever Homes: So I have a kind of rigorous opinion about this. And again, it comes from my own experiences and the way that I practice and how we work with our clients.
But modular construction is the most rigorous form of prefabrication. It is driven by very tight controls. Obviously, transportation in nature and what factories can actually build. So I happen to think that if we want to build a modular project, you need to start there. I think that's how you start to conceive of the building.
But, modular construction in most places is still a form of traditional building. It just takes place off site. And the systemization changes from shop to shop, and the technologies used to do it are obviously quite different. And, we're seeing robotics and automation, which is a whole other topic to begin to discuss.
But at the end of the day, construction is pretty consistent. So I think for that reason, there are other ways to build the same house. And we start with modular in my office and then we'll evolve it into something different, whether or not that's panelized or kit style construction or even just being smart about traditional building.
I've liked this sort of slogan that, build a prefab house, even if you don't prefabricate it, right? Disciplines that go into this are valuable for every part of the construction process. It forces a discipline for detail and problem solving and front loading all of the information so that the construction stage can be smooth and fast or as efficient as it can be.
But I think people should keep it all on the table, that these are all really good options. Modular is a great way to build. It's not a panacea in my experience, and it doesn't work everywhere. There's certainly a lot of places where we can't get modules easily or power lines, which may or may not be a situation after these fires are a real impediment to modular construction in a lot of instances, the queue, as you mentioned, might be discouraging.
The transportation costs certainly can be a real challenge. And so for these reasons, I like the idea of having different ways of building the same house. But it's really hard to get into modular if you don't really have a modular geometry to start with. I think our collective experience is probably that people are happy to say, "Oh, I've got my plans. Can I build them as a modular project?" You look at this thing and it doesn't have the right shape and the right joinery. And those are always too efficient and too costly to do in a factory context. And I think traditional construction should always be there. And in my opinion, it's a way of, lowering the bar a little bit on exploring these ideas.
Now that changes from operation to operation. A lot of the, static stuff, the prototypical homes, that are being provided by a factory there really isn't another way to do that. Sometimes. design oriented stuff has a little bit more options, but I think people should be open minded about how to bring this to bear.
We could talk about the differences in another podcast, but, panelization can be great. Certainly it's going to accelerate some of the trades that are going to be in high demand in LA. Carpenters in particular bringing in panels. Some of them are smarter than others. Some of them are a little bit more sophisticated and finished than others.
Can really have some real benefits and surely there's a whole movement afoot to improve the performance of buildings and panelization is really pushing a lot of the innovation in that direction. There's some cool stuff in the market.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: They're also, by the way, sometimes panelization or kits, again there's a whole spectrum of how these can be easier to finance too, because it can be considered stick build homes.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: So you have a product that is like a fancy two by four. A panel and it's got insulation and some of them are pushing for utilities and systems and finishes into these types of panels too. Again, it's from an open minded perspective. I would keep all of these ideas in motion and certainly want to help people discover the right way to build and it's not always modular.
It's a good thing to do, but, it doesn't work everywhere.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Toby, thank you so much. You've been a wealth of knowledge on this. Again, everyone Toby's from Clever Homes. You can find him and email him directly on the site. He's extremely responsive. But me and Toby are going to do, or Toby will do a number of these.
Hopefully we're not going to do most of them on fire rebuild stuff, but if there are subsequent questions, maybe we'll do a few more of those. But yeah, we are excited to dive into a lot of topics over the next couple of months. So thanks again for listening.
Toby Long, Clever Homes: Thanks. Michael, this is great.