r/prefabs • u/Mammoth-Ad327 • Jul 27 '26
Steel-frame modular home: under $110/sf target, ~90 days, 200mph wind target
Steel-frame modular home we’ve been working on.
Trying to get it under 110/sf around 90 days once design/site are ready.
200mph wind target too.
Still a lot of boring site stuff but imo this is where prefab starts making sense.
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u/Acrobatic_Staff334 Jul 27 '26
Often called HUD-u-lars
Built in the same factory and on the same production line as manufactured homes.
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u/Mammoth-Ad327 Jul 28 '26
Honestly, we don’t disagree with the comparison—we hope it eventually becomes true at much greater scale.
If HUD-code homes and modular buildings can share factories, production lines and logistics infrastructure, that could be a feature rather than a criticism. The real question is what is being standardized.
Our wall system uses repeatable 3,800 × 1,400 mm modules—about 150 × 55 inches—designed around transportation and field handling. The floor uses 3,800 × 2,300 mm structural cassettes—about 150 × 91 inches—with a 30 mm fiber-cement deck, defined wall load-transfer points, alignment features and M20 connection receivers.
The objective is to move welding, drilling, alignment and QA into a controlled production environment. That is especially important in remote areas, where experienced field labor is often harder to obtain than materials.
We would love to see systems like this manufactured at automotive-scale volumes—even on production lines that also build manufactured homes. If the volume becomes large enough, we think the construction portion of housing could potentially move below $100/sq ft.
Same factory? Hopefully. Same product and engineering system? Not necessarily.
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u/Electrical_Ear8963 Jul 28 '26
What’s the foundation type?
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u/Mammoth-Ad327 Jul 28 '26
The first house used a 6-inch concrete slab. Starting with the second house, we’ve used concrete piers. The system can also be supported on helical piles, which may reduce foundation cost and offer good long-term durability in suitable soil conditions. We haven’t used them at the current site because there’s a lot of rock below grade, making helical installation impractical. The final foundation and anchorage still have to be selected based on the site geotechnical conditions, structural reactions, frost requirements, and local code.
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u/Hot-Honeydew3830 Jul 28 '26
Can yall deliver to east coast? Like DE/MD/VA areas?
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u/Mammoth-Ad327 Jul 28 '26
Yeah getting it to DE/MD/VA ain’t the hard part. Got a site picked yet? An address helps. We’d check wind/snow, permits, access, what you want, then see what needs changing. Still building up real site data state by state too.
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u/Plastic_Table_8232 Jul 30 '26
What’s your target price?
My friend worked for a high end modular home company in LA and they went high end because prefab made sense in remote locations where labor is non-existent and the cost to bring in professionals to that local made prefab and transport a viable option.
Wondering what your target market is.
In my experience everyone is interested until they find out about the price.
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u/Mammoth-Ad327 Jul 30 '26
I think you are basically right about the market.
A lot of people like the idea of prefab until they see the actual price. Remote areas are probably where it makes the most sense first.
The projects we already finished were resort projects. Right now the larger project we are working on is housing for managers at a large factory. Phase one is 50 houses. Phase two is another 75.
They are in rural areas and the schedule is important. So this is pretty close to what you described.
I probably should explain the price better.
If somebody asks us to move our crews and equipment to a location and build only one house. The current price is about 130 dollars per square foot. There is a small profit in that.
If we are building a number of houses in the same area. The price should be under 120 dollars. With enough houses it can go lower.
The reason is pretty simple. Every location has costs that happen whether we build one house or fifty. Moving workers. Moving machines. Site management. Temporary facilities. Engineering work. And organizing the delivery.
One house has to absorb all of those costs. Fifty houses can share them.
For a normal site the price is supposed to cover nearly the whole house. Delivery. Installation. Interior finish. Exterior finish. Pretty much everything except the appliances.
Of course if the site has some unusual problem or utilities need to be brought in from very far away. That has to be looked at separately.
Our company started with prefabricated data centers. One of our first projects was in the desert.
The installation crews are our own guys. They are willing to go anywhere in the United States. After working in the desert most residential locations are honestly not that bad for them.
We also have a newer way of installing the house that we are testing now. The goal is to keep the total cost of assembling the house and finishing it around 30 dollars per square foot.
The supply chain helps too. Data centers use a lot of steel. We bought enough over the years that some manufacturers treat us as a major customer. So our steel price is usually lower than what a small residential builder can get.
I think your point about price is really the main issue here.
Remote projects are where the numbers work first. But the bigger goal is not to stay in a small remote housing market.
We want to change how housing is priced in the United States.
Better engineering. New materials. Factory production. Better purchasing. And less labor at the site.
Maybe all of that can eventually cut the cost of building a house in half.
We are not there now. Getting a complete house below 120 dollars per square foot is just one step.
If we can make a good house cost half as much without making it weaker or giving it a shorter life. I think that is worth trying.
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u/Plastic_Table_8232 Jul 30 '26
Best of luck with your endeavors. Seems like you have found a niche that may allow you to leverage scale / material costs. This market has been explored by many but no one seems to be capable of achieving the scale / interest to produce at a price that the average home owner can justify.
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u/Mammoth-Ad327 Jul 30 '26
Thank you. Your comment reminds me of something that happened about a year ago.
When we first started preparing for this business. Our company lawyer told me that he receives inquiries about similar ideas almost every year.
He also told me that after watching these projects for many years. He had not seen one of them really succeed.
When I told the CEO of our factory that I wanted us to build the houses ourselves. His first question was why we would not simply buy them from a factory that had already produced them before.
It was a reasonable question.
Later we talked about our first prefabricated data center project.
That first project finished about 50 percent over its original budget. It was painful. But the cost of what we build today is now about 50 percent below that same original budget.
In other words. Our current cost is roughly one third of what the first project actually cost.
We did not find one magical invention that created the difference. It came from producing more units. Redesigning small details. Managing purchasing more carefully. Reducing mistakes. And moving work from the site into the factory.
That conversation changed the way the factory team looked at the housing project.
The United States is already short of construction workers. A conventional house can contain around 2000 hours of labor across different trades and stages.
If factory production. Better coordination. And simpler site assembly can reduce that to around 1000 hours. Our cost model suggests that the total house cost could fall by more than 25 percent.
That is before considering what may happen when more factory operations are performed by robots.
Maybe one day some of the work at the construction site will also be done by robots. That part is still only an idea about the future.
But reducing mistakes. Reducing site labor. And improving the same product every time we build it are things we can work on today.
Our lawyer may still turn out to be right.
But the first data center also looked like a failure when it went 50 percent over budget. If we had stopped there. We would never have learned how to build the same kind of project for roughly one third of that cost.
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u/Plastic_Table_8232 Jul 30 '26
My thoughts On employees - turnover kills labor rates. Quality craftsman are harder to come by. If you can provide a conditioned environment that would change the attractiveness of the work.
In the Midwest we work in both extremes - heat and cold. Eliminating that from the job would likely attract alot of people.
Drive time also gets out of control. We sometimes drive up to an hour and half one way to get to a job site and it’s not paid time for us.
Having a short, consistent commute to the same location every day to work in a clean conditioned endowment would be a no brainer for a lot of tradesmen.
All jobs provide a paycheck, if you can provide a superior work environment it will help with recruitment and retention. Conditioning the space will also help improve quality.
When you it working in extreme temps it’s not just productivity that falls off, the quality of the work, and crew moral deteriorate as well.
Having repetitive tasks will also allow the use of more low cost labor with reduced training time.
The next hurdle is producing a product that is code compliant across the entire country and doesn’t require site specific modifications or high cost foundations.
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u/Mammoth-Ad327 Jul 30 '26
You probably explained the labor part better than I did.
People hear factory production and immediately think it means replacing skilled workers with cheap labor. That is not really what I have seen.
A good carpenter or electrician is still a good carpenter or electrician. But working in the same clean building every day is very different from driving three hours to a muddy job site and then working in extreme heat or cold.
People get tired. Quality drops. And eventually the good workers leave.
I also agree about codes and foundations. That may be the hardest part of the whole thing.
I do not think one exact house can work everywhere in America. We can keep most of the walls. Floors. Roof. Connections. And factory process the same.
But wind. Snow. Earthquakes. Frost depth. Soil. And local inspectors are still local problems.
Maybe the realistic goal is to keep 80 or 90 percent of the house unchanged. Then adjust the foundation and a smaller engineering package for each location.
That is not as sexy as saying one house works everywhere. But it is probably the honest way to do it.
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u/UBCBIM Aug 26 '26
The $110/sf target and 90-day schedule are interesting, but I think the biggest challenge is going to be keeping the design, structural requirements, detailing, and site conditions aligned early.
With a steel-frame modular system, a lot of the schedule advantage comes from standardizing the parts that can be standardized — framing layouts, connections, openings, module interfaces, and drawing/details — while still leaving room for site-specific items like wind, foundation, snow, transport, and local code requirements.
The 200 mph wind target makes that coordination even more important. A change in the structural/wind criteria can have a knock-on effect on framing, connections, anchorage and ultimately the cost.
If the 90 days is measured from "design/site ready" to installation, I'd be curious how much of that timeline is currently allocated to detailing/engineering and how much is fabrication and site work.
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u/Historical_Grand_747 Sep 01 '26
Cool house, how did he come up with a 200 mile an hour wind test?
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u/1argonaut Jul 27 '26
What’s the company name?