Industry in Focus Report
by Eric Miller, MHMSM.com journalist
The show, which sends a deserving family on vacation while a home is constructed for them, gave the television and network crew a first-hand look at modular construction.
“They were wildly enthusiastic about it,” comments Nationwide Marketing Director Dan Goodin. “The construction team was extremely positive with comments like ‘We should build this way all the time.'”
The home features 12-foot ceilings, gas fireplace, loft, glass block shower surrounds and is fully accessible.
Two members of the Williams family have Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, (Lou Gehrig’s disease) which attacks the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement.
The idea for the show originated at a Nationwide exhibit at the International Builder’s Show in January, 2009.
More than 30 Nationwide builders either sponsored or participated in the build, including 22 on site assisting in the set and completion. Among them was Scott Shimberg of Scott Shimberg Homes of Tampa, Florida. In a video shot on site in Georgia, Shimberg called his company’s involvement the opportunity of a lifetime.
“It’s an evolution of the buildings systems process that it only makes sense that you would engineer a house the way you would engineer any other manufactured product from a car to a boat to anything that we build and to migrate to a process where we’re engineering in a controlled environment and then assembling on a job sites—it just makes a lot of sense. This is the right way to do it.”
A custom builder with 50 years of experience, participation in Extreme Makeover Home Modular Edition coincided with the launch and re-branding this year of Scott Shimberg Homes* as a builder using modular methods. Shimberg told www.MHMSM.com he doesn’t use the word “modular,” however, because as he says “the homebuyer is confused by it.” In his view, the technologies are ahead of the public perception. Instead the words “off-site” and “controlled-environment” are utilized.
Shimberg also says the show was important in highlighting the advantages of housing built off-site, both to the public and to the TV crew and cast from Extreme Makeover. “They’ve built countless homes and you could just see it—in their eyes it was ‘wow,'” Shimberg says. “They’ll be doing more of this in the seasons ahead.”
The 42-minute show resulted in a marked increase in traffic to Nationwide’s web site. In addition Goodin says there has been interest on the part of other programs including HGTV’s Designing Spaces and The History Channel’s You Want Answers, part of what he says is a recent surge of interest in prefabrication in print media and elsewhere.
While the publicity from the show is rewarding, as is common in television production, much of the footage didn’t make it to prime time. For example, five hours shot in the factory with Nationwide President Andy Miller was left out.
“A lot of the cool stuff got squeezed out,” Goodin says. “The footage with Andy Miller and the designers tells a really good story and about their impression of modular housing.”
That story won’t remain untold, however. Nationwide hired its own videographer to record the event and will release its own video told from a builder’s perspective later in the summer.
*Hyde Park Builders is the contractor of record for Scott Shimberg Homes.
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