Are these Lego-style houses the solution to the housing crisis?
“The home is probably the most important product in people’s lives,” says Alexis Rivas, co-founder and CEO of Cover, a Los Angeles based prefab home building company. “It has a huge impact on your physical and mental well-being and it’s had the least amount of attention and investment put into it over the last 100 years.”
Rivas, a Toronto transplant, started Cover with his co-founder Jemuel Joseph in 2014 after working at a prefab company and seeing an opportunity to improve upon some of the inefficiencies of their workflow.
“They were basically building homes in a factory the same way as conventional construction,” says Rivas. “They were still building with two by fours, hammers and nails, and drywall. There were some efficiency gains by building in a factory, but it wasn’t automotive level production.”
But unlike cars, which benefit from a repeatable and templatized manufacturing process, every home requires a level of unique customization to fit the home to its surroundings like trees or power lines. So Rivas and Joseph came up with the idea of focusing on a software that designs panels meant to be flat shipped and clicked together on the construction site.
“There is a lot of flexibility because it’s just wall panels, floor panels and ceiling panels that connect kind of like life-sized Legos,” says Rivas.
The flexibility of the modular panels allow Cover homes to be remodeled by simply adding or removing panels. This cuts down on waste and remodeling time. Precision is also a key value-add of their product. Rivas boasts that the hyper-efficient software accurately calculates the resources required for each Cover home down to a single bolt.
The combination of their precise software and controlled manufacturing environment makes high-end, luxury details much more accessible. Frameless windows, for example, that are flush with the floor, wall, and ceiling, usually can be found only in very upscale properties. But this feature comes standard with any Cover home.
Cover is starting small, and focusing on building accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in the backyards of Los Angeles homes.
Patricia Galea, a Cover customer, says, “I’ve worked with a lot of traditional contactors in the past who renovate buildings and homes and the one big challenge or frustration with that approach is just all the risks and unknowns of that process. What’s phenomenal about my experience with Cover is that they handle everything from the design to the permits and plans, to the construction. It’s all seamless. And the price up front is exactly the price, to the penny, of what the finished product will be. And that’s unheard of when you build a project,” she continues. “The old adage is that it takes twice as long and twice as much cost. There’s none of those issues with Cover. I really think it’s the future of how we build.”
Cover chose to first focus on ADUs to take advantage of California Senate Bill 1069, which was signed into law by former California Governor Jerry Brown in 2016. SB 1069 was introduced to ease the housing shortage by removing excessive regulatory obstacles to building backyard dwelling units on existing properties.
It will take more than just ADUs to address the housing shortage in California. On March 2, 2022, the California Department of Housing and Community Development stated that at least 2.5 million more homes must be built by the year 2030 to keep up with demand and accommodate lower-income families.
2.5 million is an ambitious number, given that over the previous eight-year planning phase, less than half of the CDHCD’s 1.2 million proposed California homes were built.
But Cover is trying to help close that gap. “Our mission at Cover is to make thoughtfully designed and well-built homes for everyone. And when we say everyone we really mean that,” says Rivas. “That’s going to be not just single-family homes but entire apartment buildings and communities. That’s where we’re going with this.”
Cover units start at $93,000 for an office space and go up to $335,000 for a two-bedroom home. Their website allows prospective customers to enter their address and see if their backyard is eligible for a Cover home. With the backing of renowned investment groups like Founders Fund and Gigafund, Cover is actively hiring and poised to grow quickly. Although today Cover is selling their homes exclusively in Los Angeles, they’ve got their gaze fixed on nationwide expansion.
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