Calling All: Entrepreneurs, Innovators, technology gurus, and everyone that is excited about energy efficiency + passive homes –this one's for YOU!
Kurt Goodjohn, CEO and Co-Founder of Dvele explains their "self powered homes" initiatives, their positive environmental impact, (they plant 10k trees for every home they sell) and an exciting acquisition of Blu Homes.
Check out Dvele and connect on instagram.
Dvele and Blu Homes are teaming up!
Many thanks to our partners at the University of Denver for their editing and post-production talents, specifically Lija Miller and Lisette Zamora-Galarza.
The University of Denver Franklin L. Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management, teaches the full life cycle of the built environment. From integrated project leadership skills to a cohesive understanding of the built environment ––experience the only school of its kind!
"Upbeat Party" is brought to you by Scott Holmes, songwriter from Free Music Archive.
Calling All: Entrepreneurs, Innovators, technology gurus, and everyone that is excited about energy efficiency + passive homes –this one's for YOU!
Kurt Goodjohn, CEO and Co-Founder of Dvele explains their "self powered homes" initiatives, their positive environmental impact, (they plant 10k trees for every home they sell) and an exciting acquisition of Blu Homes.
Check out Dvele and connect on instagram.
Dvele and Blu Homes are teaming up!
Many thanks to our partners at the University of Denver for their editing and post-production talents, specifically Lija Miller and Lisette Zamora-Galarza.
The University of Denver Franklin L. Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management, teaches the full life cycle of the built environment. From integrated project leadership skills to a cohesive understanding of the built environment ––experience the only school of its kind!
"Upbeat Party" is brought to you by Scott Holmes, songwriter from Free Music Archive.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Hi, this is Dennis Steigerwalt president of the housing innovation Alliance, and you're listening to our podcast series. I'm joined today by Kurt Goodjohn co founder and CEO of devel homes out of San Diego, California. How are you doing today? Curt good Dennis. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us. Excited to have you here. So you and I have had a chance to talk a few times over the past few months, and you have a really interesting story as an entrepreneur in the prefab home space. So first and foremost, I want to thank you for agreeing to share that story, and then I'd love to get that story out to the rest of our community. Cool. Yeah, I look forward to sharing it. All right. There's a lot of different topics we could cover in one of these conversations, but I know that when we had a chance to connect previously, I know that you have this initiative out there called self powered homes, right?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
It's completely solar driven, um, housing solutions. So can you tell us a little bit about what that product's about the benefits with the consumer and kind of the design and engineering side of it? Yeah, so I, we talk about the client experience and that technology there, and that's really the beginning vision of devel was that we were going to create that. So then we went in and said, well, we have to buy a factory, but we all along, we've been developing that. I called them this middle layer. And one of the technology sides of the thing is the actual product, what we put into the homes as a technology. And so the self-powered initiative is the first, I guess, first aspect that we've released. And we took about a year and a half really designing our product line from the ground up. We wanted to be able to get to this point where we just released this about a month and a half ago, all of our homes going forward, Kim literally be powered by the sun.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
They're self self-powered. Um, it's especially important today with all the wildfires and blackouts and brownouts that are happening with the utility system. Our utilities are very antiquated and we look at the home is such a impactful aspect of the well functioning society. And the idea that imagine if you can build a product that is a home, that's so much different, that it stands for something greater than itself. We think that the self-powered initiative is doing just that it's, it's really one we're able to do it because of the way we build the homes. So it's in a controlled environment too, because of the way we designed the homes from the ground up. So they, the building envelopes, we designed all of our homes and all of our products around the passive home standard. So they truly are the most energy efficient home. And because of that, we can now go out and say, okay, with the solar package, which is a battery and full of voltaics, um, you can power all of your central circuits on your home with our base.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
So all of our homes are getting that if you want to truly be off grid, you can, you have a larger battery backup system that we can put into the homes we've already designed it so that it can accept a larger package. Um, and then you add more full of old tapes to the roof. It's as simple as that, but you can't just take a house and stop solar panels on it and expect it to be self-powered the base, the home, everything about it has to be super tight, super energy efficient. You have to think about it before you build it. And from a more of a social good standpoint or environmental, social, and corporate governance standpoint, this is a new term. I keep on hearing because more and more people are thinking about it, but when we first found it, it was super important to us that we stood for more than just profit.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
If we take a step back, our first initiative around that idea was we plant 10,000 trees for every home that we build. And that's cool because we have one world. We have the air that we breathe here is the same air that we breathe across it on the other side of the planet. But now the self powered initiative also speaks to that corporate ethos that we truly want to leave the world better than, than we left it. And all of our clients get to be a part of that now, as well as the fact that if you're living in say California, and you're in an area that it was affected by wildfires and the utility companies. Now we're shutting off power to try and stop that from happening. Your home is going to power itself. Your life doesn't change, and you're doing something great for the world.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
You're changing the mentality of people with what's going on right now with COVID. I think everyone's talking about how is this going to change society? And I think it goes back to again, the home can be such a powerful tool to change the mentality of society. And the self-powered initiative is just one aspect of what we're trying to do, where if you think differently about a home and people expect higher quality, more resiliency out of your home, I believe that's going to have an impact on what people expect. And they're going to stop just thinking about, well, how can I build this home for as cheaply as I possibly can, because people are going to start thinking about the future a little bit more. What we're about to release here too, is, is more focused on once you've actually moved into the home and your experience as a customer, with the product and living with it for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Our homes are lifetime products. We want people to live in them for as long as they can. And traditionally the experience, if you look at a, there's actually a cool graph out there where people are super excited when to buy in the home, they sign on, on the dotted line, the experiences, it takes a nosedive from there, then they start building and then you get excited again. And then the worst part of that whole entire experience graph is actually posts moving. And so we've looked at the post occupancy experiences as a huge opportunity to give people a heightened and an enlightened experience in their home. So we look at our clients as clients for life, and it's all stemming from this notion of, if you can control more of the process using offsite, modern prefab on our modern, modular, whatever you want to call it, it can lead to so many more things. And it's just thinking differently about the experience, the product, and then how people use the product. So obviously
Speaker 3 (05:58):
All these bells and whistles that you're working into this, um, this, this offering is it's not going to be inexpensive. Um, I'm kind of curious how it compares to other products of similar size or performance in the marketplace.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
I would say, I don't really know how it compares to other products in the marketplace. I don't focus too much on that. We do know that our homes have a six year payoff. So baked into the price of all of our homes is about a hundred for like a 2,400 square foot home. There's about $130,000 of added parts and pieces so that we can offer self-powered that $130,000 though is paid off in six to seven years in most areas, based on average days of sunlight, average power consumption. So over the lifetime of the home, the cost savings to clients, huge. So maybe we're a bit more expensive by 130 grand, but if you're talking about a million dollar purchase price to add a 10% cost premium, to be able to get to a point where for the lifetime of that home, and we're talking 50, 60, 70 years, we paid off that first 130 and the first six years, the rest of it is all goes to the homeowners bottom line.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Okay, interesting. So, and I didn't notice on your website yet, a number of homes that are being offered in, in the mid sixties. I'm assuming that's what that the site development and acquisition costs.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah. So all the costs right now. And I said earlier, like we're getting better with psych costs. We get pretty shocked. We go into new markets and we're like, Holy hell, how, how is it this expensive to build a foundation? But the prices on our website do include the modular portion. So what you get from the factory, that's the fixed price. Our next sort of product evolution is we're looking at doing things like being able to produce the foundation in the factory. So you're doing less and less onsite and leaving less and less up to just unknown and external forces.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Let's talk a little bit more about some of your other home initiatives though. I know that you're working on a program called serendipitous homes. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
So, um, there's a pretty big market out there for the smart home. You look at things like the Google home and Amazon's echo or Alexa. Like all these companies are spending a ton of money trying to get into the home. And we look at it and we look at the various options for our end users and our clients on these smart packages. And to us, they are just control devices. They're not really smart. The, um, the self powered initials are first that we wanted to roll out to the world, but next is really tackling that smart home and creating a we're calling it a serendipitous home. If you can control what goes into the home should be able to control how the home behaves and interacts. And so we're looking at, I won't say too much about it until we do actually launched this, but a couple aspects that we're keying in on are one is that the home is a, is a great source for data.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
If you think about your life, like the amount of data that can be created from just the interactions that happen in a home is huge. No, one's really doing that. So we're one trying to start to create data that can be actionable so that the home can actually learn as you live in it, your daily habits, the home will start to learn that to make living experience more serendipitous. The other side of that though, is security. The clients who are billing for, I think security to them is very important. I think the younger generation security is very important. We know Google, we know Amazon are collecting all kinds of information on us. And so there's a lot of data leakage out of homes. So we're trying to create the system that will improve your life, help your life become much easier, more enjoyable, but also keep all of that extremely secure and private. And so we've been developing this and we've been perfecting our production. We've rolled out to self powered initiative, which is really about the product that we could take to any factory now. And have it start being produced on the serendipitous home is again going to be into that product so that the end users can reap the benefits of that part of the technology that we're developing right now.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Interesting. So it sounds to me like you're going to be one of the key ingredients to the future.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
That's what we're hoping for. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Almost afraid to ask, you know, what else you might have on the, uh, on the menu here. So what, uh, as far as strategic intent or vision goes for your organization, what kind of big things are happening?
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Well, one thing that I can share with you right now, and it's a, as we're speaking where we're wrapping this up, but I go back to when Chris and I first started this company and clearly our business plan was three quarters of a page long, and it was, let's take everything that we learned, take all that knowledge and create tools and use technology to drive scale. We decided that we had to buy this factory in order to sort of control our own destiny and be able to produce these homes. And by doing that, it would allow us to create all these tools and be able to go to any person that maybe wants to own a factory, which supply them with a product or sales. We would be that technology layer in between them what's happening today, which is really cool, is we're just about finished on the acquisition of blue homes.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
And so blue homes to me is the most well known company out there in modern modular. I remember back when we started Carolina, it was around 2010 when we started our own factory. During that time, we were looking across the border at this company called blue homes, and they were pushing a lot of the same messaging that Chris and I were doing just in a small little pocket of the world in British Columbia. What they did is they, they really forged a path for us to come in and continue that. And so we're requiring what I think is one of the top brands in the world for prefab. So we're able to now embed what devel is into blue. And that really starts to position us to where we originally wanted it to be. Whereas we truly are a technology company, uh, this journey that we have laid out where Dell is truly embedded into another brand blue and people are going to have all the benefits of the self-powered initiative. They're going to have the serendipitous home, that'll be through blue. That's sort of the direction that we've always wanted to go. And it's all happening as, as we're we're speaking. And I think that can grow into a bunch of different directions. Okay.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
So it sounds like, as I listened to, you've been describing since we started the conversation, it's a, you know, you're really centered on this core of peace of mind, right. And deliver, do various aspects of your business for both you as an organization and what you're doing for the greater good of the world, but then also for the inhabitants or the occupants of these, these structures you're creating, which is really awesome. This is, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you sharing your story, letting us know a little bit about what the Val's been up to and some of the different offerings they're providing to the marketplace and how you approach the customer experience, what you're looking at at, uh, up on the horizon. Anything else, any parting words or anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we break? I think just keep watching.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
And we've got a lot of stuff in store here that we're excited to share with the industry, with the market, to our end users. It's exciting times for sure. All right, great. And if anybody listening wants to learn more, can they reach out to you directly? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just go to our website is pretty simple to get in touch with all of us. I see most messages that come through to me. So yeah. Reach out directly. My email is [inaudible] dot com and pretty easy to find. Well, thanks a lot, Kurt really appreciate it. And we definitely will circle back in the next six months and see how things are going at blue homes and with the other product offerings. Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
I'll be half of the house.
Eric Holt (13:06):
On behalf of the Housing Innovation Alliance and the University of Denver. This is Dr. Eric Holt. Thank you for being part of our journey. This is where innovation calls home.