How do we do it?
Modern Family Houses are engineered and assembled in our factory and then disassembled and shipped to the construction site. Once the home arrives, we re-assemble it on-site within a matter of weeks. Like traditional “sticks-and-bricks” construction, our steel homes are constructed in accordance with state and local building codes. All you need to do is find a piece of land and we can build a custom steel house practically anywhere.
The process of building a steel home is no different than building a house on-site with a custom builder, but it comes at a lower cost. Local builders typically buy their materials from distributors and retailers like Home Depot, which drives prices up as much as 200 percent for raw building materials, home appliances and accessories (such as kitchen counters, bathrooms, doors, and windows). A locally-built custom house will typically cost between $250 and $400 per square foot, plus the cost of the land, which increases the price by another $50 to $150 per square foot in New Jersey or as much as $200 to $400 per square foot in New York City. So is it really possible for Modern Family Houses to get the all-in cost of a new home down to the same price per square foot like an old house in the same neighborhood? Yes, and here’s how. Unlike local builders, we buy all materials directly from overseas wholesalers, bringing the costs down substantially. But we decided to go even further by tapping into foreign labor resources to build our houses based on our architects’ designs and local building codes. Using domestic labor requires several workers to be on-site for six to nine months at an hourly wage between $30 and $120. Using our new process, we are able to reduce hourly labor rates by up to 300% and lower the required on-site time to 2 to 3 months.
Once the foreign factories have the house fully assembled and all the appliances installed, it is disassembled and shipped to us in several containers. When the containers arrive at the site, our local engineers assemble the home in a matter of days.
Upon arrival, the steel house is 80% ready, requiring us to spend just 20% of the domestic labor time to assemble it on-site. This process not only saves months of labor, but it also eliminates much of the unnecessary waste created by traditional construction methods.