For years there have been rumors that IKEA or some other company would look at the United States housing market and decide that what the US needs is a good, well-built prefabricated home like the ones built in Europe.
Decades ago the Japanese automakers looked longingly at the lucrative US market and decided what the US needed was a small, high mileage and cheap car. Enter Datsun, Toyota and Honda. At first they imported cars made in Japan but as Americans began to not only accept these strange little cars, we actually started demanding more of them to the point that Japanese companies opened factories here.
I can only imagine how the European home builders have longed to expand their businesses into the world’s largest housing market. They have long stood on our borders watching our profitable industry build homes without the aid of any comprehensive technological platform and at the same time lose market share.
Well folks, Modcoach is breaking the news that our industry has some investors with real building technology and some real insight into the problems of building faster, better and cheaper. Modular housing needs to pay attention or we will go the way of Pontiac, Edsel and Saturn.
Blueprint Robotics, a prefabricated building component manufacturing company with International backing, mainly from Germany, is gearing up for a mid-2016 start. And where would this enterprising European factory begin its invasion?
No place other than the shipyard area of Baltimore, MD. Unlike US companies that enter the prefab and modular housing industry, they are not converting a WWII shipbuilding factory or a 50 year abandoned building into a home building factory.
This is not how the invasion will begin. No, they are building a new 200,000 sq ft state of the art factory complete with CNC cutters, automated machinery and as their name implies…robots. Even though several Canadian companies are using this technology, they haven’t made the investment to open state of the art factories in the US…yet!
And surprise, someone very familiar with our industry is the CEO and Co-Founder of Blueprint Robotics, Jerry Smalley. He just happens to be a partner in Stonington Partners, a real estate developer that specializes in housing in the mid-Atlantic region.
If the US modular housing industry doesn’t begin to dig in and start taking back market share, more European and Scandinavian will begin planning and working on building homes here. The East Coast is not the only place where foreign home builders will invade. Japan, Thailand and China are already making plans to take market share in the West.
All these new invaders will hit our shores with better marketing, better delivery systems and innovative building methods that we have watched them perfect for years over there and have dismissed the same way the big US automakers dismissed the Prius and the Beetle.
Is it too late? NO! Is it too late however, if the US modular housing industry doesn’t begin to jump into what is already the future of home building in the rest of the world? YES!
Like the Native Americans welcomed the Europeans to their shores 500 years ago, we will welcome these new factories with tax incentives and excitement.
