We have been speaking about Nabr and the productization of housing for the last year (and, more broadly, about prefabricated housing for probably as long as this blog has existed). And now it is possible to go on to Nabr's website and reserve a new home in their San Jose project. Here's what that looks like:

What is immediately clear is that this is an obvious improvement over the way that new homes are typically purchased. The pricing is transparent. You can easily see the floor plan and features of each home. And if you'd like to reserve one, you can go ahead and do that right away for $1,000:

You can also specify whether or not you're interested in Nabr's lease-to-purchase program (known as LEAP). More information on that can be found, over here.

But the exciting question remains whether thinking about and executing on this new housing as a product, rather than as an individual project, will ultimately bring greater cost efficiencies and savings. In other words: can it make housing more affordable?

Today, the base pricing for SoFA One looks something like this:

• Home 1002: $1,415,000, ~1080 sf (excluding exterior space), $1,310 psf

• Home 1003: $2,144,000, ~1547 sf (excluding exterior space), $1,386 psf

• Home 1108: $938,000, ~795 sf (excluding exterior space), $1,180 psf

These are just the first 3 homes that showed up for me when I opened the website. And while I'm not intimately familiar with the San Jose housing market, Realtor tells me that the median sold price is $1.2 million and that the median list price per square foot is about $766.

Though not really an apples-to-apples comparison, this suggests to me that the above pricing may not be as affordable as some people were hoping for. However, it is more or less where I figured pricing would need to be in order to make a high-rise project like this pencil.

Does this change over time with more product scale? I think it could.

We have been talking about prefabricated and modular buildings for so long that it's easy to think it might never happen. (Here's a related post that I wrote back in 2015.) There are also lots of groups that have tried and failed. Perhaps the most high profile is the bankruptcy of off-site construction company Katerra, which had raised some $2 billion in funding, but for whatever reason(s) couldn't figure things out.

That said, I'm starting to get the feeling that change might actually be underway in our industry. Over the last few months we've been talking about startups like Nabr. But there are many others, including Factory OS, which has been quietly building affordable housing in California (presumably far away from here). To date, they have completed 10 buildings and over 1,200 units, and they have another 24 or so buildings in the pipeline.

This feels promising to me. And I think it's being aided by our current environment -- costs are way up and people are desperately searching for efficiencies. But if this is really going to transform our industry, I think we're going to need to be willing to make some sacrifices. Standardization and efficiency likely means making some concessions around design and overall specificity. Not every project can be custom, as is generally the case today.

That likely means that cities and communities will also need to become more forgiving when it comes to urban design guidelines. Could you please step your building back right here and follow this oblique angle that lines up with this important historic datum line? Nope, sorry, can't. Our production line can't accommodate that sort of change. Would you like the most affordable housing possible with today's means or would you like a custom design?

Nabr, which I wrote about last year over here, recently announced its first residential project in San Jose's SoFA district. Named SoFA One, the project is expected to have 125 apartments that will be offered up on a hybrid lease, own, and lease-to-own model. In this latter scenario, the company is saying that people will be able to buy with as little as 1% down. Construction isn't scheduled to start until later this year, but if you'd like to get early access, you can add yourself to their waitlist, here.

As a reminder, Nabr is touting itself as a direct-to-consumer real estate company that aims to bring the same manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies that we have seen in virtually all other industries to the production of housing. This, of course, is not a new ambition. The flatlining of construction productivity is well documented, and lots of architects, builders, and entrepreneurs have tried to innovate in this space over the years. But it's clearly a notoriously difficult problem to solve. So the obvious question here is: What is going to make Nabr any different?

Nabr is trying to productize housing. To do this, they're building a vertically integrated process, going deep into supply chains, and trying to standardize their product offering as much possible. In the case of SoFA One, the base building is expected to consist of a CLT loft-style frame that can then be fitted out with various interior offerings. The idea here is that 90% of the build will be a repeatable system but that the remaining 10% is something that their customers will be able to customize -- similar to when you're buying a new car. The car is the same, but would you like black leather or brown leather?

Continuing with the car analogy, the company is also taking a move out of Tesla's playbook for how they plan to roll out their products. The plan is to start at the top of the market (like what Tesla did with its expensive roadster) and then move downmarket as they drive efficiencies and cost savings in their delivery process. What they are trying to do is find the compounding innovation that has been present in most industries but that has been noticeably lacking from construction.

This all sounds great, but we know that buildings have a myriad of unique challenges compared to other products like cars and smartphones. My iPhone is the same as your iPhone, except for maybe the color and the case I put on it. But each development site is unique. Some have a high water table below it and some don't. Some have adjacencies that will impact how you need to build and some don't.

Each jurisdiction also has unique codes and regulations -- everything from urban design guidelines to more or less stringent seismic requirements. Some cities have snow and some cities don't. The list goes on. So what Nabr is going to have to do is create regionalized products with as much repetition as possible. And if they can generally lock the ~90% base building systems and just adjust the balance as needed, maybe that's enough to do it.

At the end of the day, our industry is not completely void of innovation. It's just a bit slow to change. We never used to build skyscrapers, but now we do. So I've decided to cast my developer cynicism aside. Today, we don't have truly productized housing, but maybe we will.

As an aside, Nabr also recently shared their leaderboard of cities where people want to see a future Nabr building. Those cities are New York, London, Los Angeles, Toronto, and San Francisco.

Image: Nabr

We have been speaking about Nabr and the productization of housing for the last year (and, more broadly, about prefabricated housing for probably as long as this blog has existed). And now it is possible to go on to Nabr's website and reserve a new home in their San Jose project. Here's what that looks like:

What is immediately clear is that this is an obvious improvement over the way that new homes are typically purchased. The pricing is transparent. You can easily see the floor plan and features of each home. And if you'd like to reserve one, you can go ahead and do that right away for $1,000:

You can also specify whether or not you're interested in Nabr's lease-to-purchase program (known as LEAP). More information on that can be found, over here.

But the exciting question remains whether thinking about and executing on this new housing as a product, rather than as an individual project, will ultimately bring greater cost efficiencies and savings. In other words: can it make housing more affordable?

Today, the base pricing for SoFA One looks something like this:

• Home 1002: $1,415,000, ~1080 sf (excluding exterior space), $1,310 psf

• Home 1003: $2,144,000, ~1547 sf (excluding exterior space), $1,386 psf

• Home 1108: $938,000, ~795 sf (excluding exterior space), $1,180 psf

These are just the first 3 homes that showed up for me when I opened the website. And while I'm not intimately familiar with the San Jose housing market, Realtor tells me that the median sold price is $1.2 million and that the median list price per square foot is about $766.

Though not really an apples-to-apples comparison, this suggests to me that the above pricing may not be as affordable as some people were hoping for. However, it is more or less where I figured pricing would need to be in order to make a high-rise project like this pencil.

Does this change over time with more product scale? I think it could.

We have been talking about prefabricated and modular buildings for so long that it's easy to think it might never happen. (Here's a related post that I wrote back in 2015.) There are also lots of groups that have tried and failed. Perhaps the most high profile is the bankruptcy of off-site construction company Katerra, which had raised some $2 billion in funding, but for whatever reason(s) couldn't figure things out.

That said, I'm starting to get the feeling that change might actually be underway in our industry. Over the last few months we've been talking about startups like Nabr. But there are many others, including Factory OS, which has been quietly building affordable housing in California (presumably far away from here). To date, they have completed 10 buildings and over 1,200 units, and they have another 24 or so buildings in the pipeline.

This feels promising to me. And I think it's being aided by our current environment -- costs are way up and people are desperately searching for efficiencies. But if this is really going to transform our industry, I think we're going to need to be willing to make some sacrifices. Standardization and efficiency likely means making some concessions around design and overall specificity. Not every project can be custom, as is generally the case today.

That likely means that cities and communities will also need to become more forgiving when it comes to urban design guidelines. Could you please step your building back right here and follow this oblique angle that lines up with this important historic datum line? Nope, sorry, can't. Our production line can't accommodate that sort of change. Would you like the most affordable housing possible with today's means or would you like a custom design?

Nabr, which I wrote about last year over here, recently announced its first residential project in San Jose's SoFA district. Named SoFA One, the project is expected to have 125 apartments that will be offered up on a hybrid lease, own, and lease-to-own model. In this latter scenario, the company is saying that people will be able to buy with as little as 1% down. Construction isn't scheduled to start until later this year, but if you'd like to get early access, you can add yourself to their waitlist, here.

As a reminder, Nabr is touting itself as a direct-to-consumer real estate company that aims to bring the same manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies that we have seen in virtually all other industries to the production of housing. This, of course, is not a new ambition. The flatlining of construction productivity is well documented, and lots of architects, builders, and entrepreneurs have tried to innovate in this space over the years. But it's clearly a notoriously difficult problem to solve. So the obvious question here is: What is going to make Nabr any different?

Nabr is trying to productize housing. To do this, they're building a vertically integrated process, going deep into supply chains, and trying to standardize their product offering as much possible. In the case of SoFA One, the base building is expected to consist of a CLT loft-style frame that can then be fitted out with various interior offerings. The idea here is that 90% of the build will be a repeatable system but that the remaining 10% is something that their customers will be able to customize -- similar to when you're buying a new car. The car is the same, but would you like black leather or brown leather?

Continuing with the car analogy, the company is also taking a move out of Tesla's playbook for how they plan to roll out their products. The plan is to start at the top of the market (like what Tesla did with its expensive roadster) and then move downmarket as they drive efficiencies and cost savings in their delivery process. What they are trying to do is find the compounding innovation that has been present in most industries but that has been noticeably lacking from construction.

This all sounds great, but we know that buildings have a myriad of unique challenges compared to other products like cars and smartphones. My iPhone is the same as your iPhone, except for maybe the color and the case I put on it. But each development site is unique. Some have a high water table below it and some don't. Some have adjacencies that will impact how you need to build and some don't.

Each jurisdiction also has unique codes and regulations -- everything from urban design guidelines to more or less stringent seismic requirements. Some cities have snow and some cities don't. The list goes on. So what Nabr is going to have to do is create regionalized products with as much repetition as possible. And if they can generally lock the ~90% base building systems and just adjust the balance as needed, maybe that's enough to do it.

At the end of the day, our industry is not completely void of innovation. It's just a bit slow to change. We never used to build skyscrapers, but now we do. So I've decided to cast my developer cynicism aside. Today, we don't have truly productized housing, but maybe we will.

As an aside, Nabr also recently shared their leaderboard of cities where people want to see a future Nabr building. Those cities are New York, London, Los Angeles, Toronto, and San Francisco.

Image: Nabr