Former Amazon manager Andy Holm sees the future as “Blokable” with modular housing.

Holm, who led the build out of Amazon’s physical locations, including work on the Amazon Go convenience store concept, discovered his pain during that process was actually a viable business. Finding and working with the firms that would design and build the stores, permitting projects and doing site work to get ready to build were all potential roadblocks.

“We built and launched Amazon Books in something like nine months,” said Holm. “There was a ton of innovation that was done in a short period, and all of our constraints were architecture and construction. All of our time bottlenecks were based on those two parts of the process.”

According to Geek Wire, Holm also observed thousands of new people coming to Seattle each year, and developers struggling to keep up with housing demand. Combined with an interest in shipping container construction, it was enough for Holm to know it was time to move forward – his company, Blokable, was born.

The startup is focused on manufactured and modular housing, with the goal of speeding up production, cutting costs for builders and making a dent in housing affordability.

“I was really deeply involved in the scaling out of building physical space (for Amazon),” said Holm.

“And I just saw how inefficient the industry was, and it all just sort of made sense to me in a moment, and from that point when it all came together, there was nothing else that I wanted to do.”

Holm says that Blokable will build everything from single-family homes, to accessory dwelling units that share property with existing homes, to market-rate apartment buildings, to affordable housing.

Each Blok will be furnished with a suite of smart home technology, including lighting, temperature control and the ability to chat with property managers via the messaging app, Slack.

“Instead of starting from scratch, we had designs in place in a week,” he said. “We’re looking at a one-third reduction in total project time in a difficult-to-build location at a price below the cost of traditional construction,” said Jeff Werbelow, head of development for Eden, Utah, based Summit Powder Mountain, where Blokable is working on a market rate project.

 

A View From the Industry

The Daily Business News has covered the rapid innovations of technology in the manufactured and modular industries, including a Russian company’s claims of producing a printed home for $10k.
“As with 3D housing, this is an example of an emerging technology that could – in a few years – supplant HUD Code manufactured housing’s market potential,” said consultant and publisher, L. A. ‘Tony’ Kovach.

“We know that with the proper education and promotion and enforcement of the law, the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000 gives our side of the housing industry a huge potential advantage.  But so long as we fail to see the proper PEP – Protection, Education and Promotion – of manufactured homes at the local market level, the industry may be growing short term, but longer term is insecure.  With proper PEP, amazing manufactured housing growth is proven possible.” ##

 

(Image credits are as shown above.)

 

Submitted by RC Williams to the Daily Business News for MHProNews