Venture West Panel Preview: The Modular Model

“The Modular Model: To Integrate or to Partner” panel at BuiltWorlds upcoming Venture West Conference (now less than 5 weeks away), will be a discussion you don’t want to miss.

Can the Tesla model work in construction, or was Kattera’s $2.5B downfall definitive proof that the building market is just too fragmented & cyclical for digitally empowered vertical integration?

Where are the best-positioned modular opportunities today?

These are the mission-critical questions this panel of tenured AEC professionals will address at Venture West, with opinions on the subject being incredibly idiosyncratic in the wake of Kattera's unforgettable implosion.

Prefabricated homes are far from a new concept (similar to EV automobiles), with roots that can be traced as far back as 1830 when London carpenter John Manning built his first Manning Colonial Cottage for his son who was off to Australia, which quickly became a commercial hit. A similar easy-assembly technique was applied to the Kit Houses that helped fuel the California Gold Rush of the mid-19th century. Sears even had a line of Catalogue Homes for a period in the early to the mid-20th century.

Frank Lloyd Wright, the American Institute of Architects’ “greatest American architect of all time,” put American building design on the global map, having designed over 1,000 buildings across the globe. Wright’s architectural genius inspired a nature focus toward scalable manufactured housing, taking many of his prefab/modular tactics from the automobile industry -- not dissimilar to the modular market today.

The Tesla model was tried in the construction space with seemingly all bets put on Kattera’s smart modular design, which ended in a dismal $2.5 billion collapse in the wake of the demand-crushing pandemic lockdowns. Whether this was bad timing, mismanagement, overcapitalization, overhiring, or an underestimation of the cyclicality of construction (likely some combination of these), it sparked an entrepreneurial frenzy for modular/prefabricated building, with a cascade of modular innovations succeeding this fully vertically integrated modular disaster.

This panel will dissect the nuances of the manufactured construction space, with the discussion diving into the pitfalls of Katerra, and lessons to be learned.  The disparate opinions among the panelists will lead to a spirited Socratic discussion about how much of the AEC value chain should be integrated, and how much of it should be driven by vertical partnerships among the siloed stakeholders.