Episode 2 - Toby Long, Clever Homes

The Prefab Pod

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Prefab Review (PR): Hi my name is Michael Frank and this is the Prefab Review podcast where we interview leading people and companies in the prefab housing industry to learn more about them and just make it easier to make the best decisions about your next prefab or modular project. Today we're interviewing one of the leading architects in all of prefab and modular construction - Toby long. Toby is the owner and principal of Clever Homes and Toby long design which I think has been in operation for around 15-20 years and I'd also say that I just personally started learning about the prefab industry in the last year or so and I've talked to him a few times about working together as a potential architect of my custom home and he's always been extremely helpful, personable, and responsive. So really welcome, Toby. Thanks for being with us.

Toby Long (TL): Thanks Michael.

PR: Yeah I just want to get started by asking you how do you get into this business? I checked out your LinkedIn. It looks like you started out sort of back in your collegiate career at Rhode Island School of Design. So sort of how is it your career developed?

TL: Yeah thanks. You know truthfully this kind of goes back to the days when public education was a good thing that we celebrated. I grew up in Pennsylvania amongst a family of physicians and social workers and given house. Given kind of my family's situation I wasn't interested in it. I ended up taking a class. It was actually a required class in seventh grade. So beginning of junior high all kids in the public school I went to had to take a mandatory class called construction. I mean how amazing that in public school we were forcing junior high kids to learn about trades. And so I took this class in Seventh grade called construction and it was sort of you know the other semester opposite like home-ec or something. And honestly it stayed with me. We spent half the semester building a little model and doing like design work and we spent the other half of this semester like working in teams to like build a scale model corner of a house with all the parts and pieces. And it was profound.

So I kind of grew into this precocious teenager. I picked up the phone book when I was 13 years old and I started calling architects because I thought I wanted to do this and I found some old guy who let me come in and erase Mylar. That was my first job - like literally erasing Mylar so they could make revisions. And so I started out pretty early. I worked through my teenage years all through high school and through college basically working for architects and balancing that with summer months in the construction field in construction trades. I worked for a couple contractors and got to see both sides of the fence before I left high school and went to the Rhode Island School Design where I got my Bachelor of Arts and Architecture. I learned a lot about the creative process which matched up nicely with the upbringing that I had kind of formed for myself. And so I moved out to California shortly thereafter and found myself working with a buddy to build a bar in San Francisco. And next thing I know, in the late 90s I had launched my practice.

So I started working in a pretty conventional way for a few years but never really found it inspiring or at least as I had imagined kind of launching out of creative architectural program. And fortuitously, I met some people around the year 2000-2001 who wanted to build a business in the prefab space and wanted to try to join up with a little bit of a first, second, third renaissance if you will of prefab which was taking shape around that time Dwell magazine had launched. And there was some fervor around this notion that we could challenge the way that we were not only building homes but maybe designing them as well. And so that kind of put things in motion. We took a little bit of seed money that we had gotten or had raised for the start of the company we were calling clever homes and we built a proof of concept project out in the parking lot of AT&T Park - something that we called the “Now House” and it was a panel sized prefab project that got a lot of attention and it really launched the trajectory of my career. And so over the better part of the last two decades I've built my practice around a specialty in prefabricated building technologies and methodologies and so we've put together a process a team a kind of know how if you will that really pivots on working with factory and factory based construction systems to build homes a little differently than they've been built in the past. I have to say that at this point in time it's really great to see that there's yet another perhaps a resurgence in the interest in prefabrication. And so it's been it's been exciting and certainly keeping us busy.

PR: That's awesome. So yes actually I saw that when I was doing a little Googling before our conversation. I didn't know very much about it but I saw interviews about it from like 10 or 15 years ago. Was that closer to a more standard like Blu Homes style home versus a custom. Right? All the work you do now is custom, right? How did that transition happen? Am I characterizing that correctly?

TL: Yeah. I mean I think I have a little bit of a distaste for this word custom that we seem to kind of throw around as though it negates the way that we think about design and construction that things are either you know sort of custom or not. I think the truth is that here in 2019 we've got a kind of aggregation of construction technologies and construction systems that are pretty prolific across most of the country and certainly here in California where our building codes have driven down quite highly specific requirements for the materials that we use in building projects. I kind of see custom more as a process of invention which I actually don't engage much in the projects we work on.

We we sort of recombine existing technologies and materials in ways which I think are more more personalized. So you know this goes back Michael, partly all the way to the origins of the Now House and the way that we were conceiving our place in the prefab space learning to be a professional architect here in the Bay Area and more specifically Northern California. It was very apparent to me from day one that there was no catalog that the prefab world really puts as kind of the main document for how to understand prefabrication is kind of through this idea that architecture is you know is a static model that we can repeat over and over and I think for the majority the United States and places where prefabrication has. But probably the majority of construction in the Midwest and the South are is our buildings that are constructed in factories right now we've got flat lots. You've got you know little site conditions you don't have the same urban context or suburban contexts that we do here in this in the Bay Area not the least of which of course is you know topography jurisdictional controls aesthetic values that come from requirements of subdivisions or even just the culture of a community. And so you know it seemed to me that if prefabrication was really going to become a mainstream methodology for building that we needed to move past this idea that we were selecting our homes from a book and look more closely at the means in which we were combining existing systems and technologies in ways that could produce unique solutions that allowed for context to be a part of the architectural considerations for a project. And so in my experience you know I've never worked with two clients or two sites or two budgets that were ever the same. The idea that there was gonna be some static model that we could apply to the Bay Area I found to be kind of a fool's errand. And so rather than work to sell people on existing designs our approach was more about combining systems to allow for different shapes sizes and configurations for homes. And so the Now House was an attempt to work with a sort of Lego like approach using structural insulated panels or sips as the market defines them in a way that you know could could allow for this building to have various permutations and that that kind of that culture sort of underlies the practice and and really drives a lot of our motivations today.

PR: So that makes total sense. So a lot of it's less around static design then sort of process as you said. So when you talk about process and doing things a little differently what are the core things that are important and that you'll kind of see throughout clever homes design? What do you think is distinctive about your guys practice?

TL: Well I think I position myself in a in a slightly distinct way from a number of different perspectives and so maybe you know as a first category I think design probably being the most significant. I celebrate architecture. I've been a kind of architect since I was a kid. I trained at an art school that taught me a lot about creativity and the importance of of design in our lives. And so I think first off design is at the front of the work that I do. And that's something which I think shows through the work - there is a common thread but there's also some autonomy and uniqueness amongst the buildings that we've made with our clients. And this is in response to you know the people that I work with. I've worked with families I've worked with young couples I've worked with retirees. And I think that where people are in life drives a program and that has to match up with with site conditions: whether or not that's a steep hill you know. Nothing in the Bay Area that's buildable is flat anymore. All those properties have been developed historically or whether or not it's contextual in terms of a community or an aesthetic or a design review process. We we embrace that and apply a design process using a repeatable methodology that allows for us to design buildings that fit where they go and who's doing them.

I have to say budget - I think that with a static model comes a static financial condition. And I think that that's a filter that we don't need to put on to this process of building in factories. I think that budgets are of course driven by the financial capacities of the clients and patrons that we work with. They're also driven by the market. We have to work with banks. We have to position buildings economically so that they are in a given communities strata or financial or economic condition. And so you know in my experience all of these influences on projects drive towards unique solutions. So I think you know first off maybe my main differentiator is that I really celebrate architecture. Where I am critical of the prefab industry and that I think that that's often just putting the can and hope that the right buyer comes along for the right house.

The second way I think that I've really worked to differentiate myself is that I believe firmly in trying to help our clients understand the market at large. A lot of the prefab world asks people to kind of sign up on day one and that's a long journey. We don't build houses on day one. We build houses on you know day one hundred or 200 or whatever. And that's a long road to walk with people who you've sort of just met. So I've really taken seriously the need for my clients to truly understand what the market looks like historically construction has been bought and sold through a competitive process. And I think to dismiss that as a function of business challenges people on a number of levels not the least of which is the fact that this is a relationship based business we have to know and like the people that we work with. And so part of the differentiator for my practice is I work with the industry at large. I don't own a factory I'm not a contractor and never endeavor to be either. A good project is developed by a solid team of people who bring unique skill sets and unique trades to projects. And as we aggregate expertise we get wonderful results with a very diverse and capable group. And so part of my work with clients is to help these folks we're working with understand who who are the factories who are the fabricators that are out there some of whom do a nice job presenting themselves as as you know others sort of hide in the shadows a little bit because they don't need to market there's plenty of work to do and we kind of feed into that business as a way of helping our clients do a little bit of competitive engagement at an early stage so that not just factories but the local site contractors who I think are critically also a little underappreciated in the prefab world all become folks that come to this process through a selection which is a combination of personality, availability, and costs and by helping people understand that market. I think the relationships that we build around projects are inherently more solid as we get to that moment of building. So I think that you know for me those are the two sort of prime differentiators in terms of how I help clients try to navigate this experience without feeling as though they've been put into a box and shoved into a blind alley. I think it's great to understand your options.

PR: That makes a lot of sense. So we'll get back to a couple of those questions around local contractors, rent factors and sort of a fire-round a bit. But one thing I want to get through right now because at our site we get a ton of questions about this are, the specifics about your practice. So I'll just run through a couple of questions and you know, some might be one word answer some might be more. How many homes have you guys designed and built in the history of the practice? And how many do you design in a typical year?

TL: Those are good questions I maybe I'm embarrassed to I actually don't know. I think at this point we've built several hundred homes. I think in a given year we're probably engaged in a construction of anywhere from a dozen to two dozen houses. Projects unfold over a fairly long periods of time. So we've got projects that are at various stages of development from concept to close out but somewhere somewhere in there.

PR: Are you designing them all or do you have a stack of architects?

TL: So my practice has a fairly long anthology that maybe isn't for today but we did a big pivot around the end of the recession for a number of different reasons and one of the big pivots for me was decentralizing my practice. We work with all of the fantastic digital tools at our disposal and employ a team of designers and architects that are essentially spread out across the globe. Most of everybody is here on the west coast but I have team members on the East Coast in the Midwest and a lot of folks out here as well with some international team members as well. So we have a supportive group of about eight architects and some other supportive people that do rendering work for us of course accounting and that type of thing. And then a number of consultants who work with us across the myriad of specific trades generally related to more of the engineering of the building.

PR: Makes sense and then we don't have to have a specific price. And I sort of know this answer because we've talked about this before but what's kind of like normal price range of your buildings? Feel free to get like the Bay Area. I don't know. I know most a of the work you do is in the Bay Area. But I imagine it might vary a little bit by area as well.

TL: Yeah I mean ultimately you know maybe my cynical kind of response to these questions of economics usually kind of wraps around a kind of central theme which is that you know you don't know how much your vacation costs until you get home. Right? So, so here we are at a construction project trying to anticipate the future and and essentially prioritizing and investing into the constituent parts of a building project some of which are prefabricated many of which are not and have nothing to do with free fabrication but all of which constitute the parts for a completed home project. And so my experience is that prioritization is different and differs from client to client. Everybody is an expert in homes. And so everyone has a slightly different way of prioritizing their investments. Now that said the work I do, I mean I'm in the prefab space so the work I do is is very repeatable. And so with the repeatability comes a lot of repeatable economics at least at the kind of early stages of conversation in terms of where we aim our expectations and what I usually tell clients that are kind of coming in and asking these very appropriate questions is that to plan for the entire investment into a building projects at least here in the Bay Area. And I would say probably this is true for the majority of the urban centers across the West Coast that the order of magnitude of those total investments looks something like this: which is that if we add up all of the square footage of a building project which I would include conditioned and unconditioned spaces like garages and if you add up all that square footage and you were aiming your expectations somewhere in a $400-$450 per square foot level of investment. That multiplier against all of the square footage of a proposed building project should create the order of magnitude of the total investment into a completed project. Right. So $400-$450 multiplied by all your square footage. That's gonna get you pretty close to all of the investments going in probably with the small caveat that I think most of us are guilty about which is that landscaping is generally underestimated in terms of how much we should really be allocating towards the exterior and yard and property landscape kind of elements. So that's about the order of magnitude. Now the known quantity kind of the airfare if you will that we can really throw darts towards pretty accurately are the prefab components. I do argue that prefab is a great way to build it's also a great way to plan because we know a lot about the house. At this early stage and therefore can focus a lot of our attention on the non prefab parts of the project that still have to be vetted in parallel with the building itself but the prefab world at least for the kinds of buildings that we're making with our clients and the more or less consistent level of specification in our projects is a known quantity which is right around two hundred dollars a square foot. I think that's a solid representation of the market at least as we were seeing through the end of 2018. I would expect through the majority of this coming year and you know from there there is escalation in the market. This has been something that goes up every year or six months or so but I think I try to help my clients establish preliminary expectations right around about 200 dollars a square foot for your modules and now you've got to go figure out what's everything else going to takes. If you can identify that the order of magnitude of the total investment and therefore perform some prioritization to balance out all of those investments makes sense.

PR: So what locations do you typically serve? I know you do a lot in California. Do you do much work outside of California?

TL: I have but I haven't been recently. The truth is that there's a lot of work here in California. We are you know as you know, significantly behind in our construction of new housing unit demand in the Bay Area and I would argue the periphery seems to be very consistent despite what we're hearing now about you know early economic indicators all that I guess the jobs report today may speak otherwise. But you know so most of the work that I'm doing is here in the Bay Area. The majority of it is I would say, within a three hour radius. I have worked in other western states. We have worked on the East Coast. I've done a couple of international projects. The truth is that people who call me with questions are looking for answers and so many of those questions really go back to networking. I don't know how much foundations cost. I would argue no one does except that a network in a given region is a sounding board for those kinds of questions. As I wander outside of a territory which I'm less familiar and therefore haven't really managed the same level of networking it becomes more difficult to answer those questions confidently. And so at least at this point in time rather than trying to go out and discover a lot of these answers I've been more focused on trying to work where I know a little bit more of the answers to those questions at least reliably. So yeah. So it's been it's been something that we've been looking at. One of the things that we're considering, considering but we're sort of engaged in currently really has to deal with the fact that you know our fire seasons in California are here to stay. And I think we're gonna be all everybody kind of come into the party here needing to be able to help throughout the entire state. And maybe that's a broader comment about the western half of this country that reconstruction of areas devastated by fire is going to be part of our culture and part of something that we're going to have to learn to do. So we've been doing a little bit of work of course not only in the north bay with the fires of two years ago but now starting to engage some folks down in the Malibu area from the fires of this past year and of course paradise is a whole other problem that's going to take a very long time to resolve. So the firm I've set up has an ability to kind of work anywhere but we've been for the most part focus a little bit more regionally here over the last few years.

PR: OK so now we're getting into our Fireround. Well I'll rattle off a question try to answer it in one minute or less. These are not going be on clever homes but will be about you know helping us answer some questions that I have a feeling you might have expertise on. OK so modular panel or a stick built. I assume you have designed or worked on these. How do you choose which style to build. Or how do you choose with clients which styles to build for which projects.

TL: Short answer panelised and stick build are both site assembled techniques that require local resources for the majority of the construction of the building. Modular buildings are built almost entirely off site using resources which are not regional. Modular Buildings are stick frame buildings they're just built somewhere else so they're no different at the end of the day than the stick built structure that would be assembled on site panelized prefabrication seeks to improve the performance of some aspect of a building: steel insulation, fire resistant, city strength, etc. because it requires local resources and it is an improvement upon some aspect of the performance of the structure it has been my experience that it is more expensive generally than stick built construction and so stick built framing onsite versus penalize building both site techniques but panel ization is more expensive. Generally speaking since 2010 we have focused exclusively on modular construction which is conventional building albeit done in a nonconventional way although because the materials are consistent with what would be built onsite in the stick built. Generally we do find that they compete on price tradesmen are familiar with the materials used in modular construction.

PR: Great. How do you or should clients building new prefab homes select a local builder to finish up the home. What are the questions that you should ask? How should they find them etc?

TL: So it's personality availability and price. And so how do we get there? Well, partly that's myself my networking. Networking comes from the work that we do as well as the factory partners that we're also working with. We get a lot of shared interest and camaraderie that happens in prefab buildings. So we are all in support of each other whether or not that's a factory helping find local contractors or a local contractor helping to vet factories. I think you do interviews. I think you check references I think you look to previous project experiences. I think we accept the reality that a lot of contractors have never done prefabricated building projects before and therefore are facing a learning curve and we should support that.

PR: We need more people to be able to execute projects of this type. Which factories do you typically use and work with and why?

TL: I would argue it's the same process. It's personality, availability, and price. We've got to understand you know who's out there we gotta let them look at the project and provide us with preliminary feedback that comes over both as a expectation of quality but also information and competitiveness. I think through that experience of engaging in that level rises to the top. We find the right partners who are available at that point in time they can meet the economic criteria. There are a number of fabricators across the West Coast that we work with. Method homes is probably the furthest north of the Canadian border. We do some work with Green fab and Seattle. We've done work with Fidelity builders in Albany, Oregon. We do work with a Plant Prefab which is down in Los Angeles. We do work with Dvele which is a new company also down in Los Angeles and there's probably another half a dozen or so facilities across the West that we've also worked with in the past.

PR: This is getting away from the fire round. How do you decide which one? Is it just the one that’s the closest location to the project you're doing or are there other factors in choosing the factory for each project.

TL: I don't think that transportation is the meeting the main gating factor. I think we have to align culturally it's got to align on price and so transportation factors in but I don't think we select only because of region things.

PR:] And then last fire round question - steel framing. So you mentioned a second ago and you mentioned on your website. How does this possibly affect home construction and how does it compare to other styles of framing?

TL: Well steel is strong and you can make an argument for fire resistive city and pest protection et cetera but it's more expensive. People compare prefabrication against the old way of building. We seek a better way but we compare it against the old and so not many tradesmen carry steel tools in their trucks. A lot of steel framing and a lot of steel construction is a commercial application and so the industry of contractors and subcontractors that are familiar with how to build steel buildings in the residential world is not a robust community. And so we have to accept the learning curve and sometimes the additional costs that come with building with steel cool.

PR: And then final question. This is no longer a fire round question. It's a question we ask everyone during these. What are you most excited about or your company or the kind of prefab and modular industry for the near future like what should we be looking out for or that gets to you.

TL: Yeah I mean I think the future and where our practice is headed is actually in a prefabricated larger buildings as important as it is to understand the market in the industry of pre fabricating single family homes. We're not going to single family home our way out of the housing problem. We need to create density. We need to create buildings that are taller that are denser that are more modern than our current infrastructure. And so I'm most excited and most bullish on the modular market as applied to larger projects that are mixed use multifamily and I'm very bullish and quite excited about the future for prefabricated high rise structures which I think is going to be really the future we're all aiming towards so that we can essentially build out more of our urban infrastructure faster and more predictably than than I think we're able to do. Currently.

PR: That makes a ton of sense. And I know there's a lot of Bay Area housing advocates and other housing advocates that agree with you. Thanks again, Toby.