Sasha Jokic of Cosmic Buildings, the next generation housing company, speaks with Kerim Baran of SolarAcademy about what makes Cosmic different vis-a-vis other modular home builders. Sasha shares the unique approach Cosmic is bringing to the design, construction, and financing processes of modular homes.
The transcription of the video is below.
Kerim: What makes cosmic special vis-a-vis the other modern prefab manufacturers like Blue Homes is one that I know used to be in the Bay Area and I think, they’re either not doing too well or they might have a closed shop at this point. How are you not going to have the same fate Sasha?
Sasha: Yeah, the core problem is the business model, all of this traditional modular companies are taking on so, they invest into really expensive factories with the goal of producing as many as possible homes. But the problem is, that you place this factory in some certain markets where you feel that there’s a demand, but then you realize at some point that you can only serve the certain region because the cost of transportation from the factory to that location, it will be much higher if you ship it somewhere else.
So, what happens with the housing industry is there’s a fluctuation really big fluctuation in demand, so once the demand goes down, your factory is basically losing money and that’s what we have seen in a lot of those business models and all those example with Catera and Blue Homes and other that basically collapsed. So what’s unique with Cosmic is that we are not intending to build a factory, you’re really innovating on the software on the data science and on the supply chain software to really help us to use the existing capabilities of maybe not as much focused on manufacturing capacities for construction industry but designing our utility box that can be produced by anyone. It’s the key and producing them in bulks so you can basically purchase them even before you know a customer it’s one of the really big important parts of our play game.
The second part is, that everything what comes on the top of the utility box. It can be done traditionally. We basically put all the expensive components into utility box and then drive the cost down on the rest of the building by making significantly simpler so, either traditional framing system and wall system can be worked. Also work with the cosmic buildings and thought it means that we can use existing network of home builders going to work with us or willing to really be part of our process. I think that’s something.
What we specifically highlight in our company is creating a special relationship with the home builders will be one of the key parts of our scalability part, means home builders traditionally operates you know end to end and us coming helping them getting more deals and faster deals and easier to build and them understanding everything how Cosmic works. It takes time but this will be and we already right now working with a really great professionals, great home building companies in the California that are really excited about what we are bringing on. They consider us as a really high super digital enabled architects who understand construction and that’s the partner they were looking for a really long time and that’s really big and really important part of everything what we do here.
Kerim: Got it, well thank you for this explanation gives a deeper insight.
Sasha: Yeah thank you, thank you Kerim. This is something what’s I think is really important part of the whole equation.
Kerim: Yeah.