When the average American thinks about a custom home he thinks of finding a builder and perhaps an architect who take his dreams and convert them into the home of his dreams. Always the fly in the ointment is cost. Can the average American afford the luxury of a custom designed home?
The answer is in today’s technology there are five ways you can afford a custom home. By way of introduction, however, let us point out that the last time you bought a washing machine or a refrigerator it wasn’t dumped in parts in your driveway for you to assemble. It was assembled ready for use under controlled conditions inside a factory. And, that is the way homes should be built - - and are being built increasingly - - today. Automated Builder magazine estimates that well over 90% of all homes built in the U.S. are produced in part or completely inside factories. Let’s look at the possibilities:
- Modular Home Manufacturers. Today there are about 200 residential modular home manufacturers in the United States. They make home sections in a factory which are 95% complete when they go out the factory door. Virtually any home you can dream up from a Santa Fe adobe to a Colonial multi-story can be produced in modular factories. These homes are considered the highest quality we build and the strongest we build. They can be customized by varying the size of the home’s sections and by stacking these sections about like a child would build with blocks. You can plan your dream and then contact the factory and/or their builder/dealers in the local area and they’ll tell you how it can be done. Last year modular factories turned out over 166,000 homes.
- HUD-Code Home Manufacturers. This is what we use to call the mobile home industry. Today they call themselves the manufactured home industry. Inside the housing industry we call it the HUD-Code industry because this is the only segment of U.S. housing that builds to a building code put together by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. These homes are also built in a factory. Erase from your mind the image of the old single section tin box set on concrete blocks in a rural area with a rusting car out in front. Those days are history. Today the HUD-Code industry can build about anything you want to design, and they too can stack their units into beautiful two-story homes. The big advantage with a HUD-Code home is that this industry prides themselves on being nickel squeezers and they can keep the cost of any kind of a custom home at rock-bottom, and they know how to do it. Again, visit the factories and/or their builder/dealers and find out what can be done and how the model you pick out can be customized to your specific desires. There are around 90 headquarters for HUD-Code home companies across the U.S. and they operate over 350 factories. What’s more, most of the large companies in this field also build modulars. Last year the HUD-Code companies built 192,000 houses.
- Production Builders. Production builders are what has evolved out of what we used to call stick-builders. Today, there really aren’t any pure stick-builders left except those who spend year to year and a half building a mansion for someone. However, virtually all of the average builders in the United States, including some of the giants like Pulte, Centex and K&B, use components in their construction of site-built homes. Because they do use components, that is major house parts such as floor trusses, wall panels and roof trusses, their homes can be customized to your specific desires. In fact, some of the larger firms have even gone into in-plant production of their own components and this apparently is going to be the wave of the future. We estimate about 7,500 large production builders in the United States and last year they built 984,000 homes.
- The Panelized Home Manufacturers. All panelizers specialize in custom homes. The days when they use to publish a catalog and tell you that you could have anything you wanted as long as it was in that catalog are long gone. Most large panelizers have literally legions of home designers sitting at computer terminals customizing homes to meet their customers’ desires. We estimate about 3,500 panelizers across the U.S. (which includes some of the major big-box stores handling building materials) and last year they produced 877,000 houses.
- The Component Manufacturers. These are independent companies which operate inside factories and make major house parts, such as roof trusses, floor trusses and wall panels primarily for production builders. However, a growing number of these component manufacturers (which you can probably find in the Yellow Pages under the word trusses or roof trusses) will work directly with consumer buyers. Those that won’t will still meet with you but will refer you to one or more builders to actually erect the components they make - - unless you happen to be a carpenter yourself. This is probably one of the most over-looked arenas for getting a custom home in America. These people design all of their components on computers which quite literally do not allow engineering mistakes to occur. Therefore, you are assured up front, as you are with all factory builders, that what you’re buying is going to be peak quality and meet all local and regional building codes. There are about 2,200 independent component manufacturers in the United States. We don’t estimate the number of homes they build because most of what they build in the plant are erected in the field by production builders.
