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Transcript

Prefab Review

Hi, my name is Michael Frank and this is The Prefab Pod presented by Prefab Review where we interview leading people and companies in the prefab housing industry. Today, we're speaking with Herb Rogove and Wayne Norbeck of Liv-Connected - a modular and tiny house provider out of New York. Herb is the CEO and Wayne is a partner and the director of business and design strategy. Thanks for joining guys.

Liv-Connected

Thank you for having us. Great to be here.

Wayne Norbeck

Yeah, great to be here.

Prefab Review

To start off, it would be great to hear a little bit about Liv-Connected and what you actually do.

Liv-Connected

Sure, I'll jump in. About five years ago or so, I spoke to Jordan Rogov, my son and CEO of the company and also a partner Wayne in the architecture firm, and asked how we could bring architecture, design and health care together; based upon that we sat down and had a lot of discussions. I know Wayne and George have done some work in Namibia and Haiti with their architecture firm so they have some health care experience then we figured out we put that together with a nice modular well-designed system and take it to market, and we've been active now about eighteen months with our products and things are starting to pick up and we're there to fill a gap and hopefully help a lot of people with great housing, quality housing.

Prefab Review

That's awesome, you can see their models at Liv-Connectected.Com. So according to your website, this is sort of manifested through, basically, I don't know what you call them lines or products or whatever. You have your Conexus and your Via lines. Can you talk a little bit about them and how you decided on those as sort of your two initial models?

Liv-Connected

Sure, I'll just start and I'll leave Wayne who's the expert with the details. We decided that there's an interest, especially near the factory, of folks looking for tiny homes and of course there's a big movement across the country. We felt that that would be a great offering. Then some people were looking for larger homes, larger than five hundred square feet or starting at five hundred square feet. The market brought us to that conclusion: both interest and disaster homes to replace the FEMA trailers as well as people who want homes that are a little bit larger, or second homes, or people who're downsizing retirees. And then Wayne and Jordan and Joe, our third partner, came up with a great concept known as the click system and I'll turn over to Wayne to give you more details than the architectural significance of why and how we came up with that.

Wayne Norbeck

Yeah, so when we were designing this prototype and thinking about sort of you know, how disaster relief works in particular. The typical FEMA trailers are sent out on a single truck bed and they're shipped as space so to speak, so it's about eight and a half feet wide, eight and a half feet tall and they're brought out as a single unit, brought to the site and there's been a lot of sort of building science issues with them: mold and so forth, they haven't been a very uplifting type of environment to live with. So our goal was: we take the same type of shipping, that single truck, for the initial prototype and say what size house can we get on it and we developed this click system that Joe Wheeler, our other partner, had pioneered through his work through different initiatives of Virginia Tech and the solar decathlon. And so we're thinking about modular as a set of cartridges or components that can be, instead of shipping the space, you're flat packing everything and you're compressing all the space and therefore, when you come out to the site, you're taking these sort of big chunks of walls and bathrooms and kitchens and you're locking them together. But what you end up with is a house that's almost double the size of what you would get if you just had a single unit on the truck and that's the sort of secret sauce of what we're providing here.

Prefab Review

I may have missed that, that's Interesting. So for your multimodule homes, I was under the impression that everything was built modularly, or are those built on site?

Wayne Norbeck

Yeah, so well, it’s that the sort of components are all built in a factory. 

Prefab Review

Right

Wayne Norbeck

So what we'll do is you'll have like for example, the whole bathroom is done as one component, the kitchen wall that contains the cabinetry and the cooktop and so forth is all one unit and then, there's sort of two solid components at either end of the house and then in between them there's roof panels that are kind of like eight feet by eight feet or so, wall panels like that floor panels. And so what you do is you come out on site and you have all these larger scale components… 

Prefab Review

Right.

Wayne Norbeck 

… that have been done in the factory, that's the kind of modular aspect. But it is a different approach to modular in that you're coming out and then you're assembling very quickly these other components to make the house. So when we did our very first prototype, which was a one-bedroom, we put it together in about 4 hours on site but the great thing is, is that the shipping is so much less and so much more efficient with this model and it allows for, you know, a lot more sort of volume to reach the site at a better cost.

Prefab Review

That makes sense, so I'm still trying to get my head around this. Are we speaking to all your models, or specifically just the Conexus model?

Wayne Norbeck

So that's the Conexus model and so what you end up there is with a sort of full house with that model. We also have a second line called the Via and that's the tiny home that's on a chassis and on wheels, that is done as a full on modular unit.

Prefab Review

Right? Oh okay, so I may not have understood this, so this is helpful. So the Conexus models, they're not on a trailer chassis, do they go on a manufactured foundation?

Wayne Norbeck

Correct. Yeah, then there's, you know the foundation is sort of, we like to say we're foundation