Our Newest Design Innovation: Launching houm by Three Squared, Inc.

This is a very special episode becuase we finally get to reveal the massive partnership we've been working on behind the scenes for a while!

In this episode Claire, Breck, and Leslie finally unveal the new partnership between houm and Three Squared, Inc.
 
What is houm? Think of it as an innovative building process that optimizes the way we design and fabricate single family homes. 

Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn in today's grand reveal episode: 

• What is houm? How does it work?
• Behind the scenes of Three Squared & houm's partnership
• Who is houm best suited for?
• Why Three Squared is expanding beyond Cargo Architecture as the leaders in Innovative Real Estate

For the full show notes for Episode 35 click here.

Supplemental material:

houm page: www.threesquaredinc.com/houm
 
Blog posts: 

All About houm: The Three Key Terms You Need To Know

Everything You Need To Know About houm's Process

Introducing The Faces Of houm: Getting To Know Breck & Scott

If you have more questions or want to talk to a member of our team about your own houm project contact us here. 

Make sure to mention “houm” in the contact form and we will put you in contact with the right member of our team to support you. 

Ready to move forward with your project? Contact us here and we will put you in contact with the right member of our team.

Make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay up to date on new project releases, trainings, and more. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Innovative Real Estate Podcast with your hosts Leslie Horn, Brett Crandall, and Claire Olilla. We're here to make your life easier as a real estate developer and teach you everything we've learned about designing and building innovative homes, multifamily, and mixed-use structures. On this podcast, we'll be giving you our best advice, trainings, and QA segments so you can learn from our years of experience and make your innovative vision a reality. Welcome back to the show, everyone. We are your hosts, Claire. Leslie and Brack. And woo, do we have a doozy for you today? And we've been waiting on this episode for a while now. Long time. For a minute. Yeah, thank you. So we're really excited for what we're gonna dive into. We have a massive launch that is happening today, as of the release of this recording, uh, which is that Three Squared, as you know it, is launching a new alternative construction product for the future of single-family homes. You have heard us go in extensive detail on this podcast around the problem in the housing industry today, where you can't build a house really right now to make it make sense to rent it out. Like the numbers just aren't crunching. And so we've been hard at work really expanding our horizons. You know, we've made our name, you know, us as the experts, the leaders in cargo architecture, bringing you the best in single-family housing, multifamily, mixed-use construction with these really unconventional uh building materials and paving the way in these changes for the future of housing. And today we are bringing you a new option, and we're going to be explaining how this came to be. We're going to explain to you exactly how this works. And we're really excited to introduce you to this product in more detail so that you can explore this option and see if it makes sense for your projects. So I'd love to pass off the mic today. We uh we usually kick it off with a project highlight of the week, as you know by now, if you've been tuning in for a minute. But basically, this whole podcast episode is our project highlight of the week. So, Breck, can you please introduce to everyone what this new building product is and um give some intro here?

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Yeah, I'd be happy to. Uh so the product is a thought process um that manifested into a different way of going about building houses. Um, so that's specifically what we're targeting, hence the namesake home. And it's home spelled phonetically. So it's H-O-U-M. So if you got to remind yourself, you can call it a home, but it's it's home. And uh and 3Squared is partnering with home. Um, and Leslie's gonna get more into that later on on why this is a fit and how we ended up here. Uh, but but essentially, like uh Three Squared Inc. is the architecture firm that powers the product of home. Because what we've learned over the years is that there is a time and a place for shipping containers to be a part of a building. There's also a time and a place where it doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless we hit like a scale of efficiency and built like dozens and dozens of them, right? So on these one-off projects, um, we've been working on a solution for years. So home's construction approach is combining digital fabrication and industrial manufacturing to create attainable homes that are better crafted and more beautiful than current things on the market. Um, we're rethinking how people are actually building right now and using industrial tools. It's like, stop and think for yourself just for a minute. Why do we still cart large groups of uh sticks and bricks to a job site and then put it together piece by piece? Like that's not how the rest of the world works. That's not how we build cars, it's not how we build airplanes, it's not how we build pretty much anything in the world except for homes. And so we're kind of taking that approach to heart and like chunking it into larger portions. It could be built off-site. It doesn't make it necessarily modular construction because we're still pulling all the pieces together. But uh think of it like a Shinola watch. You build all the parts elsewhere and then you manufacture it on site, and it's a beautiful, more efficient, better product at the end of the day. It's a smarter home, super efficient and scalable building technologies. And so we're looking into not just one way of actually building the home. We're actually utilizing steel structure envelopes. We're actually utilizing SIP panels, uh, which are structural insulated panels that can be fabricated off-site and brought in. But what is at the essence of home's uh priorities here is that we're rethinking how we lay out a home. So that it's a very efficient layout, so that everything that makes a house a home, all of your heating and cooling, all of your water, all of your electrical, is all coming in at one moment and then distributing from the core of the house. And that core is the essential element that makes this a smarter home. We are also making better homes. They are impeccably crafted and beautifully designed. So instead of kind of flying by the seat of our pants and just pulling details that have been, you know, in our books for ages, for you know, a decade that we're still using the same soffit details or something, we rolled up our sleeves, we started from scratch, and we redesigned a house from top to bottom. So there is a lot of thought and effort and energy into every detail from rethinking how baseboards look and feel to the way that doors open and close inside of these homes. It's all thought to pull together as one unique object so that at the end of the day, it is a better house that you're getting for the dollars. And then it is a greener home. By using the technologies that we have at our finger trip, at our fingertips, we can actually take AI-driven technologies and cross them with human ingenuity to have efficient savings. One of the biggest, actually not one of the biggest, the biggest source of trash on planet Earth is construction waste. Like, think about that for just a second. Now, if we plan using technology to lay out the most efficient use of material, we're not gonna order a bunch of extra stuff. We're not gonna have all these extra cuts that we just throw into a dumpster and send off to landfill. We're gonna think about how we use those materials and how we pull them together in the most efficient manner so that we don't have a ton of waste. And then we're making an energy tight envelope that can't be matched. And that's one of the biggest costs of heating and cooling loss is actually air gaps. It's not, it's not just like the materials you used, it's it's how is it pulled together? And if you make it a tighter, better envelope, it's gonna have a better life cycle cost. So we're really not just looking at efficiencies up front. We're looking at the lifetime analysis of this building into the future. Will this building stand a hundred years from today? Yes or no. That's a starting point. And will we have a more efficient life cycle with less waste and cheaper uh, you know, utilities throughout the course of its life from A to Z. That's what we're assessing here as a part of this. So, Leslie, I'm gonna hand it back to you because there's a story here, and there are some core values and reasons why these two companies aligned and why we're pulling this partnership together.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

No, and Breck, you absolutely correct. And, you know, I I you're you were you came in to three squared almost like a package deal almost. You said, Oh, Leslie, through my work, um, I have I have I've been working on this other type of product. Um, I I didn't pay much attention to it, honestly, um, because I didn't know much about it. We were highly focused on cargo architecture and and how that is making a difference in today's construction climate. But the more we started, the more I started listening, and the moment two years ago, year and a half ago, you said, Hey, I'm building a house, I'm like, oh my God, that's fantastic. You know, is it a shipping container house? And you're like, no, it's not. I'm like, and I I I remember just going, that's so weird. Why isn't he building a shipping container house? I'm sure everybody, I'm I'm I know I'm saying if I said it, I know every single one of our clients, everybody on the podcast is like, well, why isn't he building a shipping container house? So we talked about it.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

You're making it sound a lot lighter because you were like, you were like, what do you mean? I know, like it was like it's not a container house.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

And you're like, wait, why? Why, exactly. So now imagine your surprise when I came back to the table and said, Hey, three squared, this needs to be a part of three squared. Like this makes so much sense. And let me tell you why, because everybody realizes like people, one of the questions we get asked often, not like every day, but you know, a dozen times last year, hey, how come your name is three squared? How come it isn't like shipping container architects or something like that? And it's because we would never choose that name, but anyway, but it's because three squared has always known that we have to pivot, we have to be flexible. We are innovators, and at the time, you know, we chose to pin our hats on cargo architecture. We went in, we did the deep dive, we know everything about containers, we know more about uh building code and compliance as it pertains to cargo architecture, which really has made us the experts. And so fast forward now to home technologies, right? And you know, something that is a smarter home, it's a better home. And it, of course, is a greener home and all the technologies that we are utilizing in order to bring this out. This made perfect sense on how to take this product and really support its ingenuity and its cost savings. I mean, we are so excited because this is a tool that we can actually deliver to the masses. We can deliver to just individual homeowners, people who want to do a duplex or even a quad. Uh boy, is this the best product for developers? And we'll go a lot more into detail in that. But you know, when I started looking at our core values, three squares core values are, you know, let's be one step ahead. Holy smokes, this product really just uh resonated with that, you know, to be good stewards of Mother Earth, the waste that the construction industry has as a whole, you know, and just to challenge convention, you know, Breck and his team have done brilliant work with cargo architecture. And we saw early on, we even talked about our Gus Box project where we used a hybrid approach. And if you take a look at a lot of our designs, Breck and his team have been really forward thinking um in the hybrid approach to construction and into design. And so, you know, we're we're just we're so excited because we know that cargo architecture is not the end-all be-all of construction. It is not for everybody.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

If I can expand on this just a little bit before we move into the story of how this came to be uh from Breck's perspective, it just wouldn't make sense for us to shout from the rooftops, challenge convention, be one step ahead, before thinking all this stuff, and then just stay in our box of cargo architecture because we know that cargo architecture is the highest and best use for certain projects. And also we want to be the innovators in the field. And so it might not always be that way. And we're not the kind of people to find our box and just then instead of um expanding our horizons always, we just stay in that one box. That just would not make sense. So this is uh this is another step that we're taking in providing you as a developer or as a first-time home builder, or even someone maybe you um have a connection in a planning department somewhere that uh you've got access to making change and progress and the acceptance of these new building technologies. Um, this is us really pushing the industry forward and using our uh our authority in this industry and our experience to enact that change.

SPEAKER_02 13:36

So really, yeah, really well said.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

There's going to be other partnerships, there's gonna be other technologies that we're gonna roll out, and this is really just the tip of the iceberg of three squared showing that we're industry leaders in just innovation and design, and and the rest is gonna follow suit.

SPEAKER_02 13:58

And one of the things I really truly love about this type of design and product and innovation breck is that it's so regionalized. So, what that means to me is that we can go to Florida, use the same technology, and utilize, you know, in in South Florida, there's a lot of brick. I mean, block work, right? There's all the cement work that will be so relevant with this product and technology that it's just gonna continue to save money. We gotta go back to for cost conscious developers, you know, and you're if you're building 20 homes, 40 homes, you know, there is a path for containers, but home and the way that you have you and and the team has designed and really created this product, it is more relevant for this type of innovation to take the lead. And that's the part that excites me most. And I think this is a good way to, a good place for us to, for you to go into more details about how home works and the story of it.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

So let's uh let's take a step back, and I just want everybody to think about something for just a minute. Think about a skyscraper that was designed and built in the 1920s. Now think about skyscrapers today. You will not have the same things in your head, they're very, very different. We we have new technologies, new material that used to be built with stone, limestone, block stacked. We can max out three, five, maybe six stories. That was record breaking. Now we're pushing hundreds of stories tall with glass and steel. Now think about a house. How were we building houses in the 1920s? How are we building houses today? How were we building houses 400 years ago? That's right. We were still smacking sticks together with rocks. And people have tried to change that. And we've talked at length on this podcast about the housing crisis and about how we are desperate for innovations and for more housing across the nation and quite frankly across the planet. This is an antiquated method of making houses, and it's got to shift at some point. So we went searching for better ways. Uh, I studied it extensively throughout my graduate education. I mean, this is like eight, nine years ago now, that I've been putting research into this particular endeavor. And it culminated with me meeting Leslie Horn, and one of those alternate construction methods was you know, utilizing shipping containers as a building element. Meanwhile, in the background, I was working with very, very intelligent groups of people to figure out better ways of building, which went beyond just the materials that we use to build. It went beyond the process of construction. It really started with we got to design in a different way. We got to think about housing in a different way that'll allow us to expand and scale. Now that comes with consequences. I'll be honest. I'll be the first to admit that. It's a hard industry to enact change. I mean, if we've been building houses the same way for 400 plus years, it's gonna be hard to tell somebody we're gonna do it differently. And that's not just skeptical contractors, it's not just the traditional tradespeople, it's also risk-averse lenders, it's also your municipal planning departments and the people who decide how things should built, be built and how they should look. It's also banks, everybody. You know, it's it's hard to initiate change, it's hard, harder to initiate change across borders that bridge multiple industries that all tie back to housing. But it's still antiquated and there's still a better way to be doing this. It's scary because you have to change a lot of things all at once in order to really move this forward. And so we took that all into consideration when we started at the core. And the core was let's think about how we design houses, how we lay out houses. Can we use machine learning technologies? So that's programming these softwares to be able to help us with a leg up. So if you plug in certain parameters into a software and it spits out a better solution than I could have done just by myself looking at the screen, we've got a head start. And so that's what's at the basis of how home operates was in the design. And from that design, we are able to offer smarter, better, and greener homes because we're combining machine learning, industrial technology, and manufacturing processes with really like the human touch, like the touch and feel of an architect working with you to make this a better, smarter, greener home. And we're offering this to anyone who's willing to partake. That is targeting cost conscious developers. This is targeting municipalities who know that their city needs additional housing. This is targeting veterans operations and student housing operations. This is targeting first-time home buyers who are looking at the market and realizing there's nothing out there that is going to meet what they want and what they need out of a house. And so, why not build a house that's more efficient than going out there and buying something that you didn't want in the first place? Why can't we look at an entire neighborhood that's missing houses on vacant lots here, there, and all around there and let these algorithms tell us the best way to lay out a house and then coming in and adding that human touch to make it the ideal and optimal solution for a developer who's trying to infill 20, 30, 60 houses all at once? Why can't we help assist a municipality who knows that their city needs additional housing by helping fill in those land bank parcels that they are sitting on for years and years and years and add to the economy, to the tax basis, and to the revenue that this city can make. Leslie, I'll hand it back to you for some final comments, but I'm really excited to launch this product.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

Hey, um, really, this has been really an amazing, this is an amazing launch day for us. I know we're going to get a lot of questions, and the number one question is going to come in how much? And again, our answer is always going to be it all depends because we don't know what your exact design is and such. But what we can, what we do know based on our research and based on our our first project that's going up this year, um, is that there is significant cost to the developer. So it makes things pencil. And when I say significant, we're looking at a really good, you know, 15, 18% in maybe even more. But once, once we, you know, I'm excited about the collaboration and I'm excited about the growth, and I'm excited about the innovation that this team has created. And so, guys, really hats off, um, really excited about this opportunity, excited about this venture, excited about bringing on home as an integral part of Three Squared's uh design purpose and design team and all of our core values, which it just hits every on in the nail on the head every single time.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Outstanding. Thank you both for your input and uh really laying out what this product is so simply to our listeners, because when we get into AI-driven technology and industrial scale efficiency and things like that, it can get really heady really fast. But I think you both did an excellent job um simplifying this for our listeners. And if you are listening to this and your ears are perking up, like, whoa, what is this? I want to learn more. We have launched some additional resources specifically for you on our website as of today. So we're gonna have Carly link those three blog posts in the description of this podcast. So you can go check those out, read through our story. Um, if you're a visual learner, you can go through and see our process mapped out exactly how it works. And if you have questions or if you're interested and just want to connect with our team, the way that you do that for this product is the exact same as how you would get in touch with our team normally. So you'll just head to our contact form in the podcast description. We've got that linked. And if you want to specifically talk to our team about home, then please just insert that into your message where it asks for some details about your project. Give us, you know, approximate square footage or um project type, all that normal description, and then also add in found you through the home podcast and want to learn more, something like that. So we're thrilled, as you can tell. We're gonna be covering this more in future episodes. We'll have um some images and renderings of some projects that we're already working on with this building technology. And we cannot wait to hear from you. Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Until next time.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Yep. Thanks, guys.