It is a way to speed up home building in the midst of a housing crisis.
Rohe Homes recently brought one of their prefabricated homes, a carriage house, to a Squamish client.
While a traditional build takes 24 to 39 months, Rohe homes take 13 to 18 months from pre-development to final occupancy.
“What we've designed is a foldable building system. So, something that takes all the critical construction, like plumbing, mechanical, electrical, structural, insulation, windows and doors, and packs it in a dimension that fits a truck, so it doesn't need any specialized permits. It doesn't require pilot cars. They can travel on any transport route. And the idea being is that if we have that fixed scope of work of construction complete, it really helps enable a faster, smoother construction process, especially for rural communities,” said Salik Z. Khan, co-founder and chief experience officer at the company.
The company became an idea when the founder and CEO of Rohe Homes, Rohan Kulkarni, visited his father’s home village in India.
“I grew up in the U.S. My professional background is in architecture and design. I worked out in the field on high-rise residential construction when I started off,” Kulkarni recalled.
“We were working for very expensive apartment home projects in New York City. What I noticed there was that we were using a lot of very archaic methods to build these super luxurious, luxury apartments... [When I ] visited my father's village, that was the first place where my eyes were opened up to housing issues and the lack of proper housing for rural and remote communities. That really got at least my architectural brain moving, and I started, just on the back of a napkin, thinking of ways that we could actually start providing housing to remote areas without having to have this huge infrastructure cost, this huge cost for getting trades and supplies out to these areas. And so I started getting into pre-fabrication.”
Customers so far have included property owners in the Okanagan, Sechelt, Vancouver Island, Terrace and Squamish.
The Squamish family wanted a carriage home for the parents. The mother and the father are moving into the carriage home, and the daughter and her family is taking over the primary house.
“Part of it was the affordability challenge in Squamish,” Khan said. “The other, I think, is just they want to be closer together.”
While the company was moving the home onto its foundations, passersby stopped and were interested, the men said.
“Being in the neighbourhood, deploying this for the last week, a lot of families actually have just walked by, come in and inquired, because they're thinking about the same thing, where it's like, ‘We have a large lot. We could put a duplex. We could put a three-plex, or we could put a garden suite in the back and allow more family.’ And I think that's also picking up in a lot of, I guess, North American communities, where people want to be close to family," Khan added.
Modular is not a trailer
Asked what misconceptions they battle, Khan said it is that people associate modular with manufactured homes, and the two are different.
“When they think of a modular, their association is a trailer—something that is temporary on site. It's not necessarily something that equates to an increase in property value, and they don't see it as the same construction materials as traditional ones. So, that's the narrative that we have to fight all the time.... Prefab is a new form of industrialized construction, which allows for a smoother process, but uses all the same materials. So we're still meeting all the code compliance. We still have to get our structurals, still have to get our accessibility requirements, but it's now done in a way where it's a lot more standardized. That is what we would like to showcase.”
The Squamish client’s model is a 720-square-foot Lotus Series lock-up kit.
“Essentially, a home that is unfinished that homeowners can take on, or they hire a general contractor to take on. We simply build and ship the unit, install it, and hand it off. So that's a model, I think, that's actually pretty open for a lot of people in Squamish. I feel that they are pretty handy, so they can take that on. The big thing is that all the critical construction is complete,” said Khan.
Kulkarni said that cost and time savings are a big reason clients turn to them.
“We're able to cost control 50% of the project, and also time control 50% of the project, because as soon as the foundation is built, this unit is showing up. It's being put onto the foundation. And now you save about six months of construction right there, and we're able to do it in about six hours.”
The cost for the units is about $170 per square foot.
The company, which manages the design, manufacturing and installation of the homes, is based in South Surrey.
“The idea behind what we're trying to do is essentially to make development easy for homeowners.”
The Squamish client is going to host an open house for locals to tour, when the unit is complete in September.
Sign up on this Open House Invite List to be included in that tour.
The Squamish family appears in this video.
