CapeCodTimes reports Jacques Lapointe, owner and developer of Pleasant Bay Homes of East Harwich, Massachusetts, has placed nearly 200 modular homes on the Cape since 1999. The most recent is a 4,600 square foot five-bedroom home overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Orleans, MA for Dee Overton. “This was a paper project up to this point. You don’t see anything real and then all of a sudden, there’s a house,” Overton said, as she watched the second of 11 modules of her vacation home being placed on the 28,000 square foot lot. Factory-built homes had a bad name here until the laws were revamped in 1997. Don Shulman, the owner of Realty Development Associates of Sagamore and Norton, says prior to then there were few regulations that governed modular housing, and problems persisted. Nowadays plans must be approved in advance by a state inspector, the manufacturer must have each component signed off by a third-party inspection team, and there has to be an onsite construction supervisor. Shulman, who says his company is the largest full service modular builder in southeastern MA, says his product is comparable to a traditional built home, and 15-25 percent less expensive. “There are no cost overruns. If the price of materials changes, it is not passed along to the consumer,” he added.
