Episode 42 - Alexis Rivas, Cover
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.Michael Frank, Prefab Review: All right. Welcome to the Prefab Review podcast. I'm Michael Frank from Prefab Review and very excited to be talking to Alexis Rivas. Is it Rivas? From Cover.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. Rivas.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: I've known about Cover for a long time, but, this is honestly the first time me and Alexis have ever spoken.
I'll be learning the nuances of Cover and their business along with you. Alexis, it would be great to just hear a little bit about Cover, and, again, we have computer screens here. If, at some point you want me to jump to the Cover website so we can walk through visuals, happy to do that as well. But, thanks for joining.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Thanks. Thanks for having me, Michael. So we started Cover in 2014. My co-founder and I started cover in 2014 and our mission is to make better homes for everyone. Thoughtfully designing well-built homes for everyone. And, prefab isn't a new idea, we've looked at a lot of companies that have tried to solve this problem before, and one of the big opportunities we saw was to actually do a ground up redesign of the process and the home itself, to be geared towards manufacturability and rapid assembly from the start. And so that's what we're doing at cover. It's a complete ground up redesign of the whole process. It's an all steel panelized building system. Most of what we've built has been custom, we talk custom, like custom floor plans. And they're built on a production line here at our factory and then assembled on site. So the panel remains factory flat packed on a regular truck, no big cranes needed, and then rapidly assembled on site. And, we're currently serving Southern California.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That's awesome. Makes total sense. So one of the things I think about is what parts of the process do you do? So it sounds like you definitely do the design, you do the panels, you do the framing, like it sounds like you do the full shell of the house.
I see you have on your website, like a CSLB contractor, the class B or whatever it's called.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Does that mean, are you general contracting on the project once it hits the site as well?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, so we do We can do it all. So we do design, engineering, permitting as well with the city interaction, getting the permits back and forth, all that stuff.
Very fun. And then, manufacturing on the production line, transportation, and then yes, the installation too. So we are the general contractor and we will also manage, and depending on the scope, if it's a simple foundation, we'll do it ourselves. If it's a multiple foundation, we will subcontract it up, but we'll manage it for the homeowner.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: All general contractors are sort of paper general contractors to some extent, right? I assume, right, someone else will come in and do it.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: No we actually do it. Like it is our own staff.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Oh, so you guys will actually have your staff doing the electrical, the plumbing, the mechanical on site, et cetera.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. The only stuff like, sometimes we'll sub out grading and more complex foundation work.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: You guys aren't doing like crazy drilling or stuff like that. Yeah, exactly.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: We're not not gonna do like a deep pile foundation. We've done projects like that, but it's always with, subcontractor partners.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah. No, that, that makes total sense and honestly, like what I see, I have a couple close friends who work for, I don't know if you know about the sort of the way, like the Larry Pages of the world build projects. They have builder rep services that essentially manage the architect plus general contractor. And I think 90% of the time the general contractors they hire in those situations are actually, like even less scaled, more scaled down than you because they're just trying to hire like the top subs in each of the verticals.
So that makes sense for sure.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, we're very vertically integrated. The people who install these Covers on site are full-time employees with, healthcare, with some ownership in the company. It's our team.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Cool. Nice. Interesting. So I guess one of the questions, and this is partly like my sort of startupy person hat, and partly a consumer, is like a lot of times startups are like, "Hey, we want to innovate at this one part, and we wanna do that better than everyone else. And sort of parts that are more commoditized, we don't." Why is it important that you guys actually go totally vertical and take on the sort of whole stack including things like electrical or siding or waterproofing, which, again, to an uneducated person like me might seem like they're more standardized parts of the process.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, it's a result of our goal, which is to make better homes.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: And just the coordination,
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Like not having to worry about labor shortages, stuff like that?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. So there's, a labor shortage and the coordination, if your average, conventional home has 24 different subcontractors, that's a big part of why it's expensive, time consuming, and unpredictable in terms of quality. With us, we have our way of doing things. We have quick connections on site. It's designed a very specific way to go together very fast. And our team knows how to put that together best.
And the other part of it, the vertical integration is our technicians that are doing the assembly on site, they're providing feedback directly to the engineers responsible for the product. So they say, "hey, this was difficult to assemble. Can you make this easier?"
And this is the iteration of the product and how we've been able to make it so much faster over the years, have been through this very tight feedback loop between the installation on site and the engineering team and the production team here. And sometimes it's as simple as, millimeters, "hey, these, all these panels were, millimeter too big. If they were millimeter under, it would've fit together so much better. Can you, look into that change?" Even small things like that, make a really big difference. So, by being vertically integrated, we're able to have a better feedback loop, which results in a, in changes to the product at a rapid pace, and at the end of the day, a faster and better end result.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Got it. That makes sense. We've done hundreds of homes with our clients via our concierge service. I like try to actively always build a personal residence at all times. So I just finished a ski house and, yeah, it felt like even on site we had even though there was a consolidation of contractors in the factory on site, we had a whole different set of people and some communication issues, as a result. So I can understand how that would be streamlined. Okay. So that all makes sense to me.
What else, are there other things? And I'll pull up some Video of your homes. I don't think I've actually ever seen a Cover in person but they look beautiful and modern. Are there other things specifically beyond the process that makes your homes feel distinct or different than other homes?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Oh, yeah. There's, a ton. Yeah, you can check out this page. This is a full size single family home kitchen. This is cool. It shows that with the same steel panels you can design many different homes. And this is really key because it is prefab, but unlike a lot of other prefab builders, most of what we've done is custom, not models. So the actual, floor plans are for the most part unique, totally using the same panel.
It is really like Legos. And I think that this video, shows how that Lego system works. And then if you go to, if you go down all the way to the bottom, the footer and you go to the fire rebuild page and you scroll all the way to the bottom of that page. This is like all the way to the bottom. Yeah. So I think this gives you a good idea, right? This is some of the homes that we've built. Joshua Tree. Beverly Hills. You've got the factory, you've got the machinery, and then you can see their panels, right?
These panels are flat packed and then rapidly assembled to make the home.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Does that mean your, homes are, financed conventionally versus needing, modular housing financing?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. It's not like a manufactured home.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: But so sometimes what we have to deal with for clients with us is right, they're kit builders, right? Where just because of the draw schedule, it means that it's more a conventional construction loan, which are widely available. And then, like the sort of high end modular people, I don't know, there's still people who finance them, like Umpqua, et cetera. But because the draw schedule's a little different in terms of more upfront, it ends up being, a little more complicated.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. We haven't run into any issues there with financing. Most of our clients have very good credit scores and this a premium product. Yeah. It's premium product. They're easy to underwrite. so we've never really encountered that as a problem.
It might be the drawdown schedule.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah. cool. I guess one question that comes to mind, I guess I have two questions. One, so again, the last time I talked to you, you all were doing ADUs and, I think, I don't even know if you were covering Santa Monica and Malibu at that time.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: I think it was literally just LA City
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: It was probably LA City. And now you're doing single family homes as well, right? And you're doing most of Southern California it sounds like?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Correct.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Why the change?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. Historically we were extremely focused and, narrow set. This page just to say it is like way underpopulated. And we, only have three projects here right now. Yeah. We're working on getting more, but we really wanted to get the photography done and the action. We've actually got lots of good photos. It's the time to do the write-ups and the floor plans. But if you check back on this page in a month, you'll see more and we'll, keep adding to it.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: We'll, add a link. cool.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. So, most prefab companies they start off with a much wider range. And we try to take a very different strategy, almost the opposite and say, "let's be as focused and as narrow as possible for as long as possible so that we could really nail the process before we try scaling it," right?
So the focus was get the process right before scaling it. And so that's why we were focused on LA city ADUs only for a long time in 2024. Last year we expanded to all of Southern California and we quietly sold to people that reached out to us for full size single family homes, last year.
And now we're more public around it and we're selling single family homes.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: I'm sure you guys and everyone I feel like in the space is getting crushed with demand for at least people interested in fire rebuilds to your, to your point. So I'm sure there's an active market there.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, exactly. And, so, now we're doing both. But really it came down to was the system ready to scale? And for a long time we thought that it was worth focusing on iterating and improving the process rather than scaling. And that's why we historically didn't expand earlier. In 2024, we broke our record twice. The first time, it's actually this project that you see at the top here. This, two bed, two bath, project. You can click on it and go into it. It's one of my favorites. It's really beautiful.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, it is. Cool foundation.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Thank you.
So that one, the previous one, we built in three weeks, on site. So that was an internal record for us. And then we also built one. This one we haven't professionally photographed yet. We built one late last year. It started right after Thanksgiving and, wrapped up just before, just before Christmas. And, we built this one in, record time. And that was from permit submittal to certificate of occupancy, 104 days.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Wow. That's impressive.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. Which is actually based on the public records we could find the fastest new ADU in LA City, ever.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Because don't they have 60 days to give comments typically.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: I mean if they follow state law.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That's what I'm saying. If they follow the HCD. I don't know how you guys deal with this, but HCD we find is actually pretty helpful.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: They're good. I actually had a call with them, half an hour ago.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: We haven't dealt with them with LA specifically, but we have done a lot with them with like kind of tonier localities of NorCal, which have sometimes have a hard time upholding those timelines.
But that's really impressive. So does that mean you got like permitting done in basically, I don't even know, for 104 days,
Alexis Rivas, Cover: We got permits in under a month.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah. Still impressive you were able to get everything done that quickly.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. Under a month. And then, it was right around, Thanksgiving. So it took a little, it took a little longer than normal to mobilize. And then, we built it in 45 days.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Wow.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: That includes the foundation, that includes the site work, the utility, trenching, even demolition, like even, some tree removal and demolition of a shed. So all of that, to basically the finished product, 45 days and then it took another couple weeks for significant occupancy.
You look at 104 days start, finish. So in, in short, the reason I'm bringing this up is like we really focused on delivering like an incredibly efficient process before we said let's scale this out.
And that's why now we're scaling it up because we've got something that really works well.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That's awesome. The biggest question we get and honestly like it's reflective of, we have a lot of pricing pages on our site, what does pricing end up looking like on, and I assume it'll probably go down a little bit on, a single family home? Like bathrooms are expensive and kitchens are expensive on a dollar per square foot basis. But, so anyway, everyone says there's a gazillion variables, et cetera, et cetera. So let's just assume that we found this like mythical, like 2000 square foot flat urban infill lot in Santa Monica. Independent of that piece of land being incredibly expensive.
But like basically if it was relatively close to your factory. And right, utilities basically on site and nothing crazy to do on the site. How would like pricing break down for something that was, let's say three bedrooms, 2000 square feet or something like that?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. It does really depend. Most of what we've built historically has been custom layouts, right? Yeah. So in terms of a process, we don't have
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Totally
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Models. We can show you plans we've done before. Maybe someone likes it and they want that exact same thing again.
But for the most part, what we've done is custom. And so we have some clients where they want the giant sliding windows. And all the bells and whistles.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: What I'm just looking for is not to like, pigeonhole you on a cost that people give you shit about later, but just like what is the range of cost people can expect for projects?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, I mean for something like that, you're probably looking somewhere between a million and a half installed. And that includes the transportation, equipment, like everything.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: So just to be clear, we're talking, so we had, I think we had Toby Long on a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about fire rebuilds. He's like a kind of a notable modular, architect.
And he was talking about the cost of modular and he was saying $600 to $800 a square foot was the sweet spot he saw for high end stuff. So I think what you're saying is $500 to $750 a square foot for, again, probably comparably high-end stuff. So that doesn't sound crazy. Yeah. Honestly, it's not crazy that sounds a little low for LA compared to
Alexis Rivas, Cover: And like I said, it, it also depends, right? Like we are currently building, a much smaller unit. There's not a full size home. But that one's gonna be over a thousand square foot. The size combined with the finishes and like this ADU has more giant sliding windows than your typical mansion. It's, like almost all glass right?
There's a huge range, right? It's a huge range and it really does depend. And the thing that we can get that upfront pricing and fixed pricing with the client pretty quickly once they reach out to us, right?
We can go through some designs, and see if you even fit or not. We can do that pretty quickly.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: One of the things we see, is we actually even see like pretty significant variance in these kind of micro markets, if that makes sense. Meaning like trying to build something in San Francisco is gonna be considerably more expensive than a few hundred miles away. But that's because the cost of living is highly variant. Does that mean your pricing is actually more uniform regardless of where you build because of the full-time staff? Does that make sense as a question?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: It's the transportation and mostly like the installation cost does go up the further you go from our factory. So for for Palisades, for Altadena people would be commuting. They're not gonna be staying in a hotel or something, or Airbnb. So the cost would be the same as building locally because it is local.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Whereas if they're going to Ventura or something,
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, Ventura like that, that'll add some to the cost, right? It's gonna, it's gonna be, say a month of hotel for like crew of, six to eight people. So that adds to cost, but it is still our crew. So we can guarantee the labor availability and, that, from a timeline standpoint, the fact that it's there isn't gonna impact the timeline 'cause it just, it's our same people that know how to build our system.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. That's helpful. Let's talk about permitting in La. I've only followed you on Twitter a little bit, but it seems to at least be a sort of, I dunno, an interest area. How do I want to approach this? All right beyond the, annoyances with permitting everywhere, which is a whole thing and right.
Obviously there's like kind of projects that we've seen go through in San Jose in like days and projects we've seen in other, as I said, suburbs where it's honestly just hard to find someone from planning to pick up the phone or whatever. Beyond that, what are like, it sounds like you guys have been highly effective on some of these projects and getting them through.
Are there best practices? Are you still, like everyone says, use an expediter for stuff, right? Which again, I, assume usually means you don't have the local connection yourself and you're just paying someone, thousands of dollars to bug people. But yeah. What are your best practices for kind of actually effectively navigating this stuff?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: For straightforward single family home, projects on like flat lots, not in coastal, we usually don't engage an expeditor. We have strong connections within the LA area. LA area, Ventura County. We've got good connections to city counselors. Sometimes the mayors in the different cities in the LA area. So we don't typically engage that unless it's a more complex project or like a coastal project. We typically engage in expedited just because that deep expertise and those extra connections for the specialty departments, it tends to really help.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: And it's a trivial in terms of time and money relative to
Yeah. Yeah. Especially relative to those projects scopes and sizes. Something like, A multimillion dollar project and thousands of dollars of expeditors.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's worth it in those cases and we engage and we have good expedited partners. But for the most part we've got really strong relationships with different, city, city officials and, and then also, the governor's office and, and, HCD. Yeah.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah. One, I mean in terms the best practice, are there other secrets to trying to get, because again, like it sounds like your guys luck or I'm like, doesn't sound like luck, skill in getting this stuff through has been really, is it just understand where to send the paperwork basically and be really effective at that or?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Part of it is practice. We've built dozens of these, specifically these, in LA City for example. We've done it a lot. We know what to expect, and, and we just submit a set that's compliant to begin with.
So knowing your stuff really helps and then, follow up.
But I will say under a month is not average. We've also had times where the city's been in clear violation of state law. And in fact, like in some cases, almost six months for an ADU even.
We've been able to get some projects through quick, very quickly. But it's not consistent.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: One of the things that I thought was interesting that we've done some steel frame homes, but it's certainly not the standard at this point. Why was doing steel frame homes important for you in terms of thinking about, because it sounds like that is standard for you.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: And it's been standard from the very beginning.
We approach the problem from a kind of blank slate. We didn't say here's conventional construction, let's do it in factory. We said, this is what a home needs to do. This is how it needs to perform. It needs to be energy efficient, safe, it needs to go together quickly, and it needs to be manufactured factory.
How should it be made? And when we asked that question and we dug into it, the answer was actually steel. And it was, for us, it was obvious once we dug into it. And it's like gauge steel. And there's a lot of reasons. The first is actually safety, we're in Ca we're we knew that we were gonna start in California and we're still in California. And seismic is really big and it's still light gauge steel. Phenomenal for seismic because it's lightweight and it's incredibly strong. So that's one thing.
Then you've got the fires. We've built, we've been building in wildfire urban interface zones for years now. And it helps, right? All, the finishes also help there.
And then the third reason actually it's to do with the manufacturing, right? If you look at the number of tools and processes and equipment that's available to working with steel at high volumes, and you compare that to wood, it's like there's no comparison.
There's so much manufacturing history and depth with steel, that what you can do with steel, how efficient you can get with the use of steel, it's incredible. And that's another big reason, right? From a precision standpoint, these things come together really well.
We've got these like floor to ceiling windows that look great and go truly right to the floor, right to the ceiling, very high end look and feel. All this comes down to precision. Steel is just a much, it is much easier to work in that kind of precision with steel than with wood. Wood just, it, works, right? It's got, it expands and contracts based on humidity. Steel, steel also expands, it contracts based on temperature but, it's much better overall in terms of dimensional stability than wood.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That makes sense. We honestly, we've seen a variety of stuff and a lot of times from a structural standpoint, we'll see components of steel homes. But yeah, it's interesting you guys have that full perspective on all this stuff. One of the other issues we've seen with steel, by the way, even though again, we've seen it largely as a premium product, is, I think I forgot when the price of steel went up a bunch, over the last couple years.
But we've seen that actually being, a little bit of, a factor in kind of costs variance. But, yeah, that makes sense.
In terms of, one of the things we talked a little bit about right there is obviously you talked about the structural component, but you also talked about homes being fire safe, which is certainly a hot button on a lot of the West Coast right now.
How do you think about making your homes fire safe as possible and is that an emphasis for y'all?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, it's so, even if we're like, it has been a concern for, a while, right?
And even if we're not building in a wildfire urban interface zone, we basically build them all the same.
Yeah. So they're all, they're all meeting that, that extra, layer of, of fire protection, the fact that the structure itself is steel and therefore like non-combustible is big. The structure doesn't add fuel to the fire.
The other thing though, if you really want to prevent the fire from even getting in, so the entire exterior is, you have the images here that are shown, wood.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: We're looking at what looks like cedar or something. Yeah.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: It's not cedar, but it's rated?
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: It's rated for an urban interface zone, but you can actually get this without the wood just to say it. There's an option without the wood.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, there's probably other cladding versions that like, you could do.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, exactly. So, you can do it without the wood and then the entire, if you, look between the wood there, and that's actually the steel. So the whole exterior sub seal, so that, that's one layer of protection. And then the other thing is actually your windows. Your windows matter a lot. Because as soon as if a fire gets in, it's too late, right? Yeah. Even if your structure is steel, your couch might catch on fire and then you've got tons of damage, right?
So our windows, they're, double pane. They're argon filled. And they have, they're both sides of the glass are tempered. So all of these things help with the fire resistance.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That makes sense.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: And they're aluminum window frames too, which is, much better than vinyl when it comes to what temperature they'll melt at.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That makes sense. And then, I guess the other question is, one of the things is we see a lot of people who are very interested in sort of energy conservation, on their homes. And honestly, California's fairly interested in that, at least, cosmetically as well, in terms of like Title 24 and stuff like that.
Yeah. Are there specific, elements of your homes that, factor in those qualities as well?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, there's, there's, a lot there. The, big thing is even though it is a steel structure, there's very little thermal bridging. And we've worked that into the design. And so that's, so it's actually a very performance system. We also use a ducted, mini split.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Oh, okay. That's interesting. But that's your standard. You don't do radiant heat or,
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. That's our standard. Yeah. We don't,
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, I'm, we've done a lot of ski houses recently. I'm thinking.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. it makes sense for a ski house, but in Southern California, radiant heat often doesn't make sense, especially when you have really well insulated floors, which we do.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Totally. Yeah. Okay. You use a mini split system, right?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. We use a ducted mini split system. So you don't see, it's not the mini split on the wall, you don't see it. It looks just like your typical, and
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: It's flat with, whatever the, the ceiling or the wall.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, exactly. You will not know what it is by looking at it. That really helps the efficiency. The windows have a low e coating which helps. And then you see these little awnings, these are an optional upgrade. But especially if you have a southern exposure, a lot of people will choose for these awnings, which, based on our analysis, can impact the energy by between five and 7% saving just from like those awnings.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, that makes sense.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: So there's different features like that, that, that really help. And then we use an insulation, which is nearly r- seven per inch. So really high performing installation
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: And are you, are the panels you're shipping, are they, basically like some version of sips, like insulated panels that are, or is it, like a different technology?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: They're our own panels. We make them here in our factory. And they have, yeah, they have the, they're like, they're kinda like SIPs with more, so they have structure, they've got the insulation, sometimes they'll have plumbing and electrical, and they'll have waterproofing already installed from the factory and exterior finish. So they're more than just sips, but it's a continuation of that.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Oh, so you're shipping them with like, when you say exterior finish, you mean like actually have siding and stuff on?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yes.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Oh, wow. Oh, interesting.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah, yeah. So they come fairly complete. To be able to build a home like this, two bed, two bath, in three weeks, it's gotta be pretty complete from the factory.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Totally. That makes sense. Cool. what else? So we're, we're close to finishing up. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. I guess so what is your concentration right now? Basically focused on single family homes and ADUs in Southern California? Or are there new things that we should like look out for you all for the next year or so?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Right now we are focused on single family homes and ADUs in Southern California. And we only expanded to Southern California last year.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Got it.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: And we're very busy. So I think we do plan to expand beyond Southern California just to say we want to go national and then global, but, with time, we wanna really scale first within this market, and then expand.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah.We see the three biggest markets that come to our website on like a city basis- greater Southern California, greater Northern California, and then actually, greater New York.
It's not that we see like a ton of stuff within New York City, but like Hudson Valley and Hamptons, we see like a ton of people. And I think it's because those are high cost of living areas. So right, like when we talked about your homes, right? $600 per square foot if you're building in Mississippi, I understand it wouldn't be that if you had Mississippi factory, might not seem as competitive, but I think right, like people understand that sort of further build quality in those markets, this actually represents like pretty good value.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: No, it's true. It's like right now, those are, the markets where it makes sense to look this fresh point.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah. Alexis, it was such a pleasure talking to you. Definitely excited to, when do you think your first single family home's gonna go into the ground. Is that gonna be soon?
Alexis Rivas, Cover: We've already built a complete single family home in 2019. It was a small one, but we built one in 2019. It's near Joshua Tree National Park.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Oh, cool.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Yeah. It's actually one of the products on this like projects page. You can see the photos. So we've already built the first single family home, but, we've got more in the permitting process. I think we're definitely gonna see some built this year.
Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Awesome. Thank you so much for talking. Just so everyone's clear, I believe the website is build cover.com, cover build on Instagram. I think cover build on Twitter as well.
Definitely if you're in Southern California, you just wanna be inspired by where the future of the stuff is going. Check 'em out. And as always, you can check us out at prefabreview.com. Thanks again, Alexis.
Alexis Rivas, Cover: Thanks. Bye.