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Transcript

Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Hey everyone, it's Michael Frank from the Prefab Podcast back with Toby Long. Today, the second in our series of demystifying certain parts of Prefab. Luckily, we've moved on from the less fun conversation topic of last week of Fire Rebuilds to today we're talking about a fun one that me and Toby both have a good amount of experience in, which is building in mountain towns.

And what we really mean when we say mountain towns is we mean ski towns. Both of us spend a good amount of time in Lake Tahoe, have done some work here. Toby's done some work in some other places as have I, mostly in the West Coast mountains. Though I guess I've done some stuff kind of in upstate New York near Hunter as well.

With that being said, welcome Toby. Thanks for joining. 

Toby Long, Clever Homes: Thanks, Michael. This is fun. I'm up in Tahoe now so I can reflect on the salient topic. Perfect. 

Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That's great. Yeah. Me and Toby are both pretty avid skiers, so we both spend time here in North Lake Tahoe. 

Toby Long, Clever Homes: It's a life work balance thing, right. 

Michael Frank, Prefab Review: It's all research and development when you're skiing. 

Toby Long, Clever Homes: You get a lot of work done on the chairlift, I find.

Michael Frank, Prefab Review: That's good to know. So if you talk to Toby and it sounds like there's a chairlift in the background, it's probably because there is one. 

 Okay, Toby, it would be great to get a quick bio of your experiences. I know you have some beautiful projects on your site from Colorado ski towns and North Lake Tahoe ski towns like Truckee and Olympic Valley. Maybe you can talk a little more about your experience building there. 

Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, Michael, thanks again for hosting these. I think this is a great opportunity to download and share our collective experiences with people. So hopefully folks find this valuable. Just as the early bio, right. So I'm an architect. I've been working in the prefab space for like 25 years. I think naturally the work in the offsite construction space finds its way into conversations in mountain towns.

I think that the process of building in the mountains is becoming more difficult with each passing year. Resources are limited. Subcontractors are scarce. The workforce has been displaced by high value real estate. The economics of construction continue to escalate. Obviously, the weather cycle is tough.

And so, you know, working with factory partners and deploying offsite construction, particularly modular building, I think is a natural evolution of what's going to be continuing to happen in mountain towns. I think we can see that as we look out to some of the entrepreneurship that's taking place, even state grants, and hearing a lot about Colorado is trying to make active moves into really pushing for offsite construction, not just for the fancy stuff on the slopes, but workforce housing in particular.

Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Nevada County, which is where Truckee is just this week passed that, Placer County, which is the other kind of like main North Lake Tahoe County has had this for a while, but that you can use tiny homes, which is really not the high end of the spectrum as permanent residence for ADUs.

And that's about as kind of offsite construction as you can get. 

Toby Long, Clever Homes: Yeah. So I think that this is a kind of natural growth and evolution of the industry. It is being served by several marketplaces now in a variety of different categories. I think, oddly, like some of the big manufacturers are actually in mountain towns, you know, Boise, Idaho, we know there's a whole collection of, manufacturers in the large, you know, multifamily space. But, I think there's a home for projects like this, these kinds of projects, in the mountains for sure. I also think that we can demystify a little bit of, at least from my own perspective, yours clearly, as well, Michael, just, that this is possible. That you can design buildings that are resilient to the environmental conditions or that carry heavy snow or, various things that, maybe people don't really, immediately associate with modular building.

I think that's a common question we get, you know, can you do it in the snow? Well, the answer is yes. And maybe we can talk about a few of the considerations that go into that. 

Michael Frank, Prefab Review: Yeah, totally. Okay. I'll make a quick point, a few points, and then we'll start to jump into a checklist.

In addition to all the building we do for clients, I just built a personal residence near Palisades or formerly known as Squaw Valley. So I have experience doing this both corporately and also as a place to, live and, have to live with mostly positively the decisions that we made in terms of modular, but yeah, it can very much be done.

In terms of the high level, this is why I think this is happening, right. And I think Toby mentioned a lot of this, the building season in these areas because of snow is short, right. We're talking about sometime in the late spring to like October more or less. And that's just like for excavation, like you're literally not allowed to start shoveling in some of these places in November or December.

So being able to build most of the actual structure of your house in a factory that is temperature controlled in December, October, February, or whenever, and then be able to, in May, when there starts being deliveries, have that drop, and then like be able to finish the house up over the summer is, I mean, it's what we just did.

And then Toby talked about the other aspect, which is a part of the value consideration on modular construction is just we'r