Word: prefabs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Forget boxes on wheels and tacky subdivisions. Prefab is now just plain fab. Once the poor stepchild of residential construction, so-called systems-built housing is now the province of topflight architects, who are reinventing the genre with innovative designs, new building components and environmentally friendly approaches. In September, Lindal (2003 sales: $50 million) begins offering two versions of the Graves-designed kit house on its website, where it already sells a prefab home created by James Cutler, the architect behind the home of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. New Jersey architect-cum-performance artist Adam Kalkin is taking orders...
Inspired by the Sears, Roebuck mail-order homes that sprang up in the early 1900s, "designer prefab" spans a number of highly nuanced--and often confounding--housing categories. Variously described as systems-built, modular, panelized, kit or manufactured, prefab homes are constructed at least partially in factories before being transported to building sites. There they can be assembled quickly, sometimes in a matter of days. While most of the new-age houses in a box have yet to be mass-produced, an expected rise in interest rates and a public hungry to meld good design with low cost will make...
...about $1.7 billion to acquire Clayton Homes, a manufactured-housing company in Tennessee that had sales of $1.2 billion in 2003. This year Clayton, in turn, spent $373 million to acquire Oakwood Homes, which offers a mix of modular and more traditionally manufactured homes. The lower end of the prefab industry is recovering after a wave of defaults resulting from overzealous lending. With interest rates climbing, more customers may now opt for relatively inexpensive manufactured homes. Recently, the damage caused by Hurricane Charley boosted stocks of companies that specialize in manufactured homes...
...Building Trend Prefab houses are getting noticed; Warren Buffett likes the industry. Is this segment ready to break...
...those avoiding prefab tunes, there's Xingtone, a $15 software program that lets users record unique ringer sounds, from a child's song to a dog's bark...