Today on growing Idaho, could the future of home building solve the housing crisis? Not completely. But if you ask the folks at Ava, a local company that uses automation to create modular housing, they can at least ease the housing crisis. I talked to the co founder, got a factory tour and chatted about the future of home building. That is quite a sight. This is the 400,000 square foot facility for Ova, a Napa manufacturer that focuses on building affordable housing by creating multi story multifamily apartments. One module at a time, we uh started uh the first automated manufacturing plant in the country is Rick Murdoch, the CEO and co founder of Ova, who's giving us a tour of their facility. So the robots do 90% of all the construction work. 285 people work here. But the robots do all the literal heavy lifting, all those construction workers with bad backs and like why didn't we have these? Yeah, I was one of them and the robots do work a little faster. But the main advantage really what we're getting out of it is the precision after the robots are done. Tradespeople step in to finish the work before the modules are shipped to the building site and pieced together into an apartment complex. All your trades will hit it, your finishers will hit it, exteriors will hit it uh and then it'll be complete. By the time it gets to the end of the door, the robots help with the significant construction worker shortage without completely cutting out skilled workers. We don't ever want to replace people. We just wanna be, have people doing the job that they're more designed to do. Also, all the work is done out of the weather. Everything happens under one roof and a lot of the construction phases can happen at the same time. And that's what's nice about this industry. At the same time, we're setting walls. We've already got people in here plumbing showers and plumbing tubs and running all the electrical. It's not waiting for one to get through before the other starts. Look, it's manufacturing while the idea of manufacturing is obviously nothing new. It is newer to Americans when it comes to home. Building everything we own has been manufactured. If you stop and think about it, we don't own anything that wasn't manufactured. Uh So why not housing? It was a bit of a change even for Rick who spent decades building homes the traditional way. But this just made sense to him. If you looked at our housing landscape across the country, I think that the need for housing is alarming. Uh And I think it's becoming crisis mode, right? And all across the country. And I think the only way you're gonna feel fulfill that is very similar to the automobile industry. Uh You've got to really understand the technology, you got to develop the technology to mass produce, right? And with mass production then office hopes is that you're drawing costs down and you're supplying more uh for more people and people are getting used to the idea. It's pretty high demand for what we do. Uh And it's growing. Rick says modular homes made up about 3.4% of the industry about four years ago, but that's now doubled to about 7%. Will that trend continue? Will all home building be done this way in the future? It will all be done this way. But I think a large majority might be. That's because this type of building is quicker, more efficient and more affordable. He says they're saving people as much as $100 a square foot where there are shipping modules in California. But unfortunately, that type of savings will not translate locally. It really works best in high market areas. High cost market areas, you might be thinking aren't things already high cost around here. Yes, but they're not quite high enough cost for auto vault be doing any local projects yet. I believe it will. I mean, uh we've seen prices go up, housing prices go up, we've seen our labor go up, we've seen all those things go up to a level that we haven't seen before. Right. And so I think that uh it won't be long until we're gonna fit very well in this market. Right? And not for all projects. Uh But for the affordable side and that's really what we concentrate on uh because it's the largest number of people out there needing housing. So is automated modular housing. The solution to that housing crisis gripping the nation and this area, I don't know if we'll ever fix the housing crisis. Uh What we're trying to do is contribute uh in a positive way to the housing crisis by making housing more affordable, more plentiful and be able to service people's needs and give them an address, everything is complete and as it seems like the crisis gets worse daily, even finding part of a possible solution seems like reason to have hope what home building looked like when you started. Could you ever imagine that it would something like this would be possible? Well, um I was hopeful, but uh here we are here, we are indeed. As of April Oval had produced about 1.7 million square feet of apartment space and more than 2300 living units.
