How 3D Printing Could Make Housing Attainable Again In Topeka | Chris Stemler

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Hired a crew, purchased a printer, and the first house should be finished, we think in June.

I mean, I've been hearing this in the real estate space for the last three or four years.

Not enough houses are being produced at a price point that is viable for most people to afford.

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Above all, Washburn delivers a personalized education that you won't find at larger schools. Learn more at washburn.edu. All right. Hey, today we have Chris Stemmler, the founder of Trident Homes 3D Printing here in Topeka. Let's go, dude. Thanks for being here. Thanks for coming to the city. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Chris, do you want to give us a little bit about your backstory, your relationship to Topeka? How'd we how did we get here?

Sure. Uh I moved here in '98 from Canada. So went to high school uh in middle school at Washburn Rural, graduated in 03, did a bit at Washburn, uh, finished my undergrad at Fort Hayes, got my MBA from Baker, uh, and then started working for security benefit, and then just kind of progressed to different roles throughout the years until you know we get here. Washburn, Fort Hayes, but you kind of made your way around here in the mid-white. Yeah, I had originally wanted to do law, and then I realized if I couldn't be like Tom Cruise and a few good men, I was like, there's way more writing involved. Yeah. So I I dipped and decided to go into business.

I said the same thing about uh Harvey Specter and suits. Like, I want to go be a lawyer, I want to be Harvey. That's not how that works.

It is not. There's a lot of writing, there's a lot of technical stuff, and it that's just not my forte. So super cool.

Chris’s Path Into Real Estate

Okay, so then you're here, you left security benefit, you uh Yeah, I worked for a number of major insurance carriers over the years until about three years ago, uh stepped away and do independent consulting. Um, and all through that time uh we had been real estate investors. Nice. So doing some rentals and stuff here in town and just slowly expanding what we did. I feel like independent consulting is something someone in the CIA would say. Yeah, I mean it might be, but that's not me, man. I'm Canadian. I doubt they'd recruit I doubt they'd recruit me. But um no, so we myself, my brother-in-law, a number of others, we work for a company here in town that we founded that does like 401k and ERISA consulting, and we have clients all across the country. So still in the financial. Yeah, so basically the same thing I was doing historically, just for ourselves, for independence, that kind of stuff.

So it seems like you're kind of involved on two different ends of the spectrum as far as you know, like investment worlds, the the finance side and then the real estate side. You got kind of got some experience with both.

Yeah, my so I'm I'm not anywhere nearly as smart as the financial advisors that are in our community who do like that great work. Um my finance is really more like how do 401ks work, how should a company set this up if they're trying to accomplish these goals, that that sort of stuff. It's kind of the boring side of finance. I don't get it. Yeah, I don't get into investments, we don't get into any of that. It's it's all about the the general legal structure of the retirement plan. Gotcha. So it's not maybe as like boiler room exciting as it might sound. Sure. It's mostly me sitting at a computer reading documents and then making suggestions to it's like the uh the the lawyer life you're trying to avoid. Kind of it's it's really interesting. We work with a lot of CPAs and advisors and lawyers in town, and it's really kind of an adjacent to all of those um lot of recommendations like hey, you're doing this, you said you want this, let's change it, yeah, you know, do it this way. So, how'd you get into real real estate? Uh honestly, my wife's idea to some degree. We had um our starter home that we bought in Topeka, I don't even remember when, and we decided to upgrade, move into the house that we're in now, and we're like maybe we keep it as a rental. Other people do, maybe we could. Worked out great. I mean, we learned some lessons. Our first tenants, it was rough. Um, but you know, we've learned over time, and we just kind of up until really just into the beginning of COVID, we just kind of kept acquiring as deals, you know. You kind of know how it goes, right? As deals happen, right? As you get access to stuff, you know. We weren't buying all the time, just when it made sense to, so that went really well.

The Beacon And A Housing Bottleneck

And uh actually during COVID is when we jumped from the single family real estate into that kind of commercial, which is when we bought the historic building that we turned into the beacon. Yeah, yeah. Tell us a little bit about that. Kind of a lark. We had been talking myself, my brother-in-law, uh, and my wife and her sister. We had been talking about an event venue of some kind. Um, and my wife was driving down past ninth and Topeka where the beacon is and saw an auction sign. We went to the auction, we bid, we actually won, which was crazy. We didn't really think that would happen. Wow. Um, and then we spent most of COVID doing the renovation. Uh, worked with Seni and Co. on that, and they did a great job um kind of converting what was there uh to what we have now, and it's from that experience, right? We were able to take the tax credits and use those appropriately, and so we got into more historic renovations, and that's ultimately what led us to the 3D houses.

Discovering Concrete 3D Printing

Yeah. Really? How did that how did historic renovations lead to that?

So we started a historic renovation project in Independence, Kansas. So a number of buildings that were doing commercial on the first floor, residential on the second floor. And uh it's been a long project because it's multiple buildings, about 20 residential units, eight commercial units. And I was traveling, I was like, man, this has just taken a long time. The city needs housing, they're bringing new businesses in, right? We got Panasonic, we got the Chiefs, right? Kansas is bringing these businesses in because it's more affordable to do business here uh for a variety of reasons, but there's nowhere for people to live. And when you look at the project, if it takes six years from start to finish to do all these buildings, that's only about three or four living units a year. Who the heck who who does that really help? And so for about a year I was frustrated like, what can I do to speed up the deployment of housing? Right? Like, I'm taking a historical building, the walls, all that stuff is still there, the cost per unit's still really high, the time still takes forever, even though we've got some of the kind of more arduous red tape stuff really down pat. Right. Uh, you know, we have great vendors we work with who help with that. And I was in a hotel travel one day and I was on YouTube and I saw a video of a concrete printer.

Crazy.

Yeah, it must have been listening to me because I was talking to my construction buddies and stuff, and yeah, it was just like he'll like this. And I did. It was I was like, you know, if this isn't some weird generated something, right? Yeah. I was like, this is pretty cool stuff.

Yeah. That is crazy, side note that sometimes you see these videos, you're like, that's amazing, and then it's AI generated. Yeah, like, dang, I thought that was real. Yeah, but so you just you stumble across this video of someone using basically a giant 3D printer with that uses concrete, to it just kind of goes around like a router. Is that how it works?

I mean, it's it's ex if you've seen a standard size, they call them FDM or filament printers, right? It's just a giant version of that, except for plastic filament, it's a mortar mixture. Wow.

Easy. And you how did you get from seeing that video to like, hey, I'm gonna buy that, and where did how where do you even get one of those? Yeah, I mean, there's yeah, there's Amazon.

There's five or six manufacturers, uh, a couple US-based, some German, a couple others. Um, the largest one has had a couple spots on 60 Minutes. They're called Icon. They did a development called Wolf Creek down in uh Texas, where they printed a hundred houses. Um Icon's a really interesting case, they have some great designs. Um but basically we started at the very beginning, and I called some friends, architecture, engineering, and I was like, hey, I have this crazy idea. Like clearly the technology works, right? But like, how do we bring it here? How do we deploy it? Is it even viable? And that was about three and a half, four years ago. And from that point on, we just kind of took it step by step. It's like, okay, how can we design an architectural plan to fit what this printer can do? What's the footprint? How fast does it deploy, you know, the the mortar, how many layers, and and we basically went through, you know, architecture, structural, engineering, you know, uh some of the mechanical stuff on the printer. And just every time we got to kind of a gateway of where it's like, is this possible? Can it work? The answer was like, yeah, probably. And so November of 24, we presented to a number of municipalities across Kansas the idea where we were and what we were gonna start doing. And they basically all said, Hey, this all looks fine if and when you're ready, pull permits. And at that point, we hadn't even functionally started the company yet. We were still in that exploratory phase, and so from November of 24 to now, we've hired a crew, purchased a printer, done all these things, and the first house should be finished sometime, we think

First 3D Home How It Works

in June.

Crazy. Wow. Yep. That's wild. Are we allowed to know where it is?

It's here in Topeka. Um, once we get it dried in, the security that we have will come down and then people be in the city.

So it's hush hush. Like people don't know where this is in TikTok. If you ask around, you'll find it. But it's not public, it's like, yeah, okay.

And it is somebody's home. So like it is a purchased house, it's not a spec build. Okay. So someone's already bought it. Correct. Wow. Yeah. And we have a pretty strong order flow behind it as well. Wow. That's awesome. That's wild. Yeah, we'll talk about why, yeah, financially, like from an economics perspective. But um the individual's uh state house rep Marilyn Poskin out of Kansas City. Oh, really? Yeah. So she's been a great help and ally. And she wanted to buy the first one. She was she was fairly insistent, and I checked. I was like, are you sure? Um, but one of the big things is, and and you probably know this from dealing with houses. Uh, houses that can be retrofit to be ADA compatible are very hard to find. New builds that are ADA are very expensive. Yep. The house we're building is actually designed as like an ADA house. Okay. So like zero entry, like that kind of thing. That kind of stuff. And what's really cool is unlike in a traditional framing, we were able to just in in the G code and the tech, just move the walls where they need to be to create the space that they needed.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. In terms of like entryways and entryways, bathrooms, right?

All that stuff. Wow. We were able to adjust it to their needs because we're not worried about, you know, 16 inches on center, right? You know, this, that, or the other thing. Are the walls solid concrete? No. How does it work? Yeah, so you can. There, there's a German company we're talking to that does produce a five-inch thick wall. Um in Nordic countries in Germany, they they insulate both sides. So they kind of do it a little differently. Whereas here we have our sheetrock insulation in the middle, and then our exterior. This printer prints uh a bead on the outside, a four to five inch air gap, and a bead on the inside.

So you can insulate the inside, run, do run electrical, still through the colour.

Yeah, everything's conduit, everything's through the walls, just like normal. Uh, there are some differences in how, but yeah, and then it's filled with closed cell foam. Yeah. So we're getting between R28 and R32 in the walls, which is pretty sout.

So maybe this is a dumb question, but uh I didn't know that. So I was thinking it was full concrete. And so part of my thought process was, you know, if I wanted to move an outlet or something like that would be impossible. And so with this, it sounds like it would be just as easy as drywall.

You have other, like just like in any renovation, you have to adjust some of what you're expecting. But you can go to Home Depot. You might need more than just a DeWalt drill. But you could drill in a hole, you can put an electrical box, you could run the conduit, absolutely. Yep.

Because it's hollow all the way up to the top, so you'd up to the top plate. Yep. That's correct. Interesting. Yeah, that is, yeah, that's not what I was expecting either.

Yeah, and then the plumbing, at least for these the the ones we're talking about, they're all gonna be slab on grade. And so all the plumbing is coming in through the slab, but it's not coming up in the wall, it's coming up like into the cabinetry.

Gotcha.

Because what we don't want to do is if there's a leak, right? We don't want to create basically a pool in your wall and the leaks coming out from the ceiling. Yeah. So the plumbing and stuff is kept separate from the wall cavities in the electricity. Interesting. Yeah, so it's those little differences, right? That we just have to, okay, what do we normally do? How's that gonna work here? Let's make some slight adjustments, yeah. Yeah, right, and and get to that different end result. That's crazy. It'll all ultimately feel and look the same, sure, but our process with development is slightly different. Yeah.

Why Housing Supply Is Broken

So you talked about the need uh for housing and kind of your backed up wait list and why that might be. Can you tell us more about that?

Well, I mean, housing prices since the beginning of COVID have skyrocketed. Crazy. And the old idea that when interest rates rise, house prices drop, right, that doesn't matter anymore. And what we're really seeing is actually a knock-on result of 2008. So in 2008, if you were a builder and you were not well capitalized, had good orders, or could just weather the storm, you failed. Well, most of them didn't come back to the industry, they left, they did other things. Well, the folks in town who have been building all our houses are are 20 years on almost, and a lot of them are closer and closer to retirement. And those are businesses that don't typically translate between generations, some of them do, but not all. And so what we're really facing now, you know, inflation's bad, prices are bad, but it all comes down to a supply problem. Not enough houses are being produced at a price point that is viable for most people to afford. Okay. I mean, how many houses are currently available for sale right now in Topeka?

Single family, Shawnee County, like 140.

Right. And and generally the the idea I've been told is that we want about three times that many. Wow. And so what you're facing now, and you probably have clients that'll tell you this if you have downsizers who want to sell their big house, right? Kids have flown the coop and they're ready for something a little less maintenance heavy, they're like, Yeah, I could sell at a high price, but where am I gonna go? So the problem is we have an inventory turnover issue. We don't have enough supply at the start to move people from those higher end or kind of last rental houses into the house ownership market, and at the top of the housing market, we don't have an ability for those people to come back down into a downsized style home. And so inventory can't turn over. You have, you know, a thousand, three thousand people shopping the same hundred houses, they keep looking at the same ones, right? Because it it does feel like the same ones tend to come back up, and they're like, Oh, well, this would be good if this would be good if. Right, right. Then we get into the age of the houses. Average age in Topeka is what, 60 to 80 years old? In that first time home buyer price range, probably even older. Yeah, yeah. So what we're running into is now not only do they have to go buy, I mean, I think I bought my first house, uh it was a while ago, but it was sub $100,000. That and that used to be fairly typical in Topeka. You could get a two-bed, one-bath kind of 1950s house for $60,000 to $100,000, and it was it was good. Yeah, that's just not possible anymore. Yeah, and so with the increase in population, right? With the lack of supply, what we're really facing is that there is a gap in new home production in that $100,000 to $300,000 range. You want someone to build you a three or four hundred thousand dollar home, slam dunk. You can find it, at least here in Topeka, right? Kansas City, that's five or six hundred thousand, but it's the same idea. But if you want something that most of us would call attainable pricing, you're buying a house that's a hundred years old that probably also needs some work.

Right.

Yeah. So what we've really come into is this economic pressure that's really all driven by a lack of supply.

A lack of actual homes.

Well, yeah, there's just not there's just not enough. And it's not, it's not just single family. There's not enough multifamily, there's not enough duplexes, like there's just not enough supply and things like that. Period. You know, the developments that Scent and these other groups have going on are great because they're gonna help alleviate some of that in different areas, but for for that hundred to three hundred thousand dollar buyer of housing, there's just a huge gap.

Which is that the majority? The majority of buyers want a hundred or three hundred. Yeah.

Well, so here, we'll just go right to the source, right? If you could take your person out, any client out, and for 250 grand, they get a two or three bedroom, two-car garage, brand new house.

Yeah.

They're gonna think about it. Mm-hmm. Right?

Yeah, no doubt about it. New construction 250, unheard of.

Yeah. And so what this is really trying to do is produce attainable housing. Wow. This can be used to do all kinds of stuff societally that will help. We can build houses for the unhoused, we can provide shelter, we can do lie tech and low income, but ultimately the real pressure, the real pressure is on that kind of same range I've been talking about. And if we can produce quality housing in that range, it's going to kick start inventory turnover. Because like we talked about alleviates the pressure, yeah. It does a little bit, right? And so the reason we have a lot of interest in order flow is simply put that whether they care about the the material or whatever, the price point puts it in an area there that that most people are gonna have to consider. Yep. Yep. That's awesome.

That is interesting. When you started all this, I feel like so, you know, there's other cities that are doing this or other states that have done it. What we're what we're bringing here isn't uh new technology, but it's new to Topeka. Chris. What kind of I don't know if this is the right word, PR work do you feel like you've had to do to convince people that this is a safe, sustainable, and a really good alternative option to what's currently out there? I mean, I can talk all day. Washburn, a proud sponsor of this podcast, wants to keep its homegrown talent at home. Graduates of Shawnee County High Schools and homeschools qualify for the Thrive Scholarship. Other local graduates may qualify for the Promise Scholarship, so you can go to college tuition-free. Learn more about these incredible opportunities at washburn.edu.

Washburn is just right, just for you. Our friends, the people that we work with, they can talk all day about it. At the end of the day, we're here in the Midwest. People are gonna want to put hands on it. Yeah, right. They're gonna want to see it. Yeah, so as much as I've talked about it, some of the news articles and all that stuff. We have to finish producing the first house so that people understand that it's not gonna be that much different. Yeah. I've spent four or five years with this. You know, I I grew up, my grandfather worked for a very large construction and concrete company. I'm used to the material, but not everybody is. It's just gonna take a minute. Yeah. Right? That's all. Uh there's not anything I can go out and promise and say and do. Right. We're Midwesterners. We're gonna want to put our hands on the the the wall and be like, Oh, it's okay and see the construction. Like we just have to do our due diligence.

So is the challenge then that you don't have a model, like you've already sold it, so people can't just like come and walk through this one.

Uh the advantage is because she's a state house rep and she lives in Kansas City, we will have the ability to do it.

To show us so people can calm, get a feel for what it's like. We'll have all that scheduled out.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that's why it's a good partnership with Marilyn as well. Just because she's gonna get to use it when she needs it. We're gonna occasionally be able to use it. Right. But I think once people really get a chance to see it, right, they're gonna understand the value it can bring.

Infill Lots Land Banks And Grants

And especially because we can do those price points that I talked about, we can do that in infill lots. One of the inside. So let's say you're driving around Topeka and you see house, empty lot, house. We can go into that empty lot with our technology and printer and put a house back there. Like it's flexible enough, basically, it can fit in there and well, and our cost per square footage, which you know, our cost per square footage on those smaller lots doesn't really change. Oh so we can produce infill housing. We all complain about property tax, right? Well, if we had 400 more houses inside of Topeka able to bear some of that burden, it might alleviate some of those pressures, right?

And these homes will be in that one to three hundred, generally speaking, range.

Yeah, and so we do um my guess is it's probably gonna be 150 to 3. Wow, and it's really probably 150 to 275. Wow, yeah. We do everything just like normal builders uh on an allowance basis. Okay, so that means yeah. So let's say what what's your favorite feature of your house? That's what do you use the most? The living room. Okay. So let's say you want a really cool fireplace and you want a vaulted ceiling and all this stuff, right? Well, we have allowances for everything, and if you're whatever you want, whatever you want, you're like, well, I really want this really cool fireplace or something. Oh, gotcha. Okay, well, here's your allowance. You want it to be ten times that much, you're just paying the difference.

Right. Yeah.

And so the range I'm giving is that if someone wants to come in and just buy a house, they're gonna get a great functional house. It's not press board cabinets, it's not any of that stuff. But especially for downsizers, they're gonna have those two or three things. They're like they can update this. Is my deal. My old house had this, so I want great, but think about things like heated floors and radiant heat. It's so much easier to do that in new construction, right? Yeah, and the cost is much less compared to trying to retrofit it into a house that wasn't built for it. Right. And so what we'll find is that there will really be a couple of types of buyers. There will be buyers who want the house because it's in a price point and in a neighborhood they want to be in and can afford. And there will be buyers who sell a big house they don't want to live in, get all the amenities they want, and still probably put some extra money back in the bank, which is a great formula for them in retirement.

Yeah. I had not thought about the info housing. I didn't even know that was a term, but I mean, I see it all the time. You're driving down the road, and you know, there's a home for sale that I'm showing. The lot next door is empty, it's owned by someone random. And as you know, in the real estate space, I'm over here thinking that's never gonna get used. You know, that's basically the neighbor's lot at that point because there's no way that someone's gonna build typical new construction on it. It's just yeah, too small of a lot, it's gonna be way too expensive, it just doesn't make sense.

The first house we're building is an info lot. Nice, yeah, really, yeah. It's it's it's really critical to it is less efficient for us. I I would love a hundred lots in a straight line, right? Yeah because then we just set the printer in the tent up and just bang, like knock them out. But that takes a lot of time and getting roads and utilities and infrastructure and trying not to use RHIDs and trying not to put in specials. Like, there's a lot of work that goes into those neighborhood developments. But we have hundreds of lots. Now they're hard to get sometimes. Uh in Topeka, I know you know the mayor and folks are working on getting the land bank up and running, which is great.

That'll be why are the why are the small lots hard to get?

The infill lots they're owned by who knows who sometimes they sound like somebody somebody dies, an estate inherits them, it's a hundred bucks a year to keep and nobody cares. Right. Or some random company picked them up and they're just holding them because they're holding them. Yeah, right. A lot of the infill lots in Topeka are owned by people who don't even live here.

Really? Yep.

Yeah, wow.

Almost most of them inherited it or ended up with it somehow. Yep. Wow.

Yep. And so the city's working on uh a lot of municipalities in Kansas through statute have land banks. And so the municipality can go in and basically claim the land back at some point. We're working with a number of them who have granted us lots to build on. Uh, independence is a great example, they've been a great partner. Uh, we're working on a project with them, an equity bank that's 50 houses. And FHL Bank actually gave us a grant for down payment assistance on those. Cool. So anybody in independence who goes to buy one of the houses gets up to $35,000 of down payment assistance. So it starts to really make a difference because I'm not charging for the lot. Yeah, we got it for free. Why would I do that? They get down payment assistance. You know, we're talking, you know, a $200,000 to $215,000 three-bed, two-bath, two-car garage, brand new house.

That someone can now get into correct much easier. Wow, that's cool.

Yeah. So once we really get that public-private partnership humming, it's great. Topeka, it's a little challenging because a lot of the state level incentives do not apply within the city limits. Uh-oh. Topeka is an entitlement city. It receives funding directly from the federal government. And so the Kansas grants that we can use for other housing and stuff do not apply here. Gotcha.

Interesting.

It's a little more challenging.

Yeah.

But out in the communities we're working with across Kansas, a lot of those tools we're using. Yeah.

Interesting. What are some of the kind of back to his question? You know, you're saying, hey, people need to like feel it and see it. Um, what are some of the big objections you're having to kind of help people overcome in like, hey man, this is just as good of a home as well.

Well, renovations are gonna definitely be one, right? Not that you add outlets to your house a bunch, but sometimes you're like, oh man, it would be really nice to have. Right. So renovations are a big one because the concrete is between four and seven thousand psi. So I mean, it's pretty stout concrete, right? You're gonna need a hammer drill, you're gonna need some special tools. Most contractors and builders have them, sure, but an individual person might not.

Right. The DIY guy.

Yeah. Um, and

Objections Codes And Cost To Scale

you know what? We've even joked about giving people hammer drills when they buy a house. Yeah, here's a hammer drill and some tap cons, right? Um so so that's one. The texture of the wall is the second, and it's probably the most talked about.

So people just paint the wall. There's no drywall over the concrete. Correct.

There's no drywall or sheetrock. Now interesting. Again, because we're building these as allowance, if somebody wants the walls to look a certain way, they can just look a certain way. Concrete is just a construction material. Right. We can put skim coat over it, we can put wains coating, stucco, brick, faux stone, regular stone, doesn't matter. Yeah, can be whatever they want. But at a base level, I think that's probably gonna be the thing people have to come to terms with the most is that uh right now, and if you go look at the videos, you see those layer lines. Now we're working on some stuff that by house three or four, those layer lines will be very faint and or non-existent. Sure. But in the short term, you're probably gonna have them.

Yep. Gotcha.

Um a guy that we we work with said that it looks like sedimentary layers. Like if you see like Grand Canyon, you can see the layers of stone. But once it's sealed and painted, uh it's it's not gonna look right that different. Yeah. But it is that's gonna be probably the biggest thing to get used to.

Right, right.

Yeah. Everything else, doors, windows, flooring, I mean, it's all all generally the same. If we can figure out a good way to get rid of sheetrock on the ceiling, we'd like to. Sure. Right. Uh specifically using like tongue and groove or something, that way we can soften up the space a little. Uh, but again, the nice thing is with us doing it generally not spec because of our order flow. Right. And having allowances, people are really going to get a lot of choice in what it looks like. Yeah. On the outside, it really looks like a stucco material, honestly.

So the outside will be the same.

There's no like siding, it's just well, you don't you really don't want to put siding on the concrete. There's really no need to trap moisture in the correct. Typically, stucco's a great option or efus because there's once you put it on, right? There's no moisture. Like stucco fails in Kansas because that freaking humidity just gets in there and rots it out. So those would be really good. Um, you could do Waynes coating, stone, right?

Like you see, you drive through creating an air gap between your correct, right?

Because since that concrete isn't gonna breathe at all, if we trap moisture next to it, it's just gonna damage whatever we put on.

Yeah, yeah. Same reason maybe you're you want the ground to slope away from your basement so water doesn't go into your foundation.

Same, ultimately the same idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cool, man. Um man, this is crazy. Yeah, this is super awesome. I mean, I've been hearing this in the real estate space for the last three or four years.

It's coming. I mean, it's in the building codes already. Yep. We don't have to like you know, building codes are kind of boring, but in 2024, I think they they've started to give like more wall envelope details, and like it's it's on the way. And the advantage is that so long as it's in some code, even if Topeka or somewhere else hasn't adopted that most recent code, we can reference those because they're often more strict than less strict. Right. So it's not like we're trying to invent something crazy, like we're just deploying a technology that's already building houses. I think over a thousand were built last year across the US with this methodology. Wow. But I mean, I say a thousand, the US is four million houses behind on its supply. Wow. So there's work to do. Kansas is about 50,000 houses behind on supply. Topeka by itself is six or seven of that. So six or seven thousand homes is what we could use in Topeka.

Wow. Interesting.

Yeah. And so when we talk about demand and issue, when we started this, we're like, oh well, you know, we don't want traveling crews, but how do we deal with like other states? And the answer is it we should just do it here first. Right? We can help other people, we can figure out franchise models or whatever, right? But there's so much need here at home. That's what we're trying to focus on.

So six or seven thousand more homes in Topeka would get us back to a place where supply and demand are in a good tension with each other.

That's what all of the housing studies that are currently available are suggesting.

Yeah. That's wild. That's a lot of houses. Yeah, just a lot of things.

Yeah, no, that's housing units. So some of that can be expressed in multifamily, some of it is single family, some of it is higher-end single family, right?

But it's still got the spectrum of correct.

Yeah, it's not just six thousand in the market we're looking for, but it is a big number. Yeah. Right. And so for each printer, our goal is depending on a whole bunch of variables, between 25 and 50 houses per print crew per year. Okay. Whoa. Now, if we're doing a development and we can find the stash, sure, well, we can actually do shift work. Oh. So we can run the printer longer.

Okay.

Okay. So instead of just doing an eight or ten hour shift, we could have shift work and run it multiple. Now, in infill, when there's neighbors, right? We're not going to do that because they would not be very happy. Right. But ultimately, the idea is that from the time we start printing until the time it's delivered to the end client is about 90 days.

Yeah. Have you guys either started or started thinking about you buying up you know acres of land for subdivisions, that way you could do the steam lines? Yeah, and we don't even have to because developers have it.

Oh, I gotcha. Yep. I I really don't of all the things I like about construction and home building and stuff, uh the ground development is stuff I just personally at least I'm tapped out on. Sure. That's not my specialty. There's a lot that goes into that.

Not my so there are developers who are getting it ready for builders and they're taking it a bare, you know, hundred acres and putting roads and plumbing and all that.

They're putting all that stuff in, and we've had some great conversations with some regional and semi-regional developers who have been struggling to do new projects because the cost of stick building is sure, let's say 225, but realistically it's about 250 bucks a square foot for finished stick build. Yep. And we're sitting around 170 to 175 dollars a square foot. Wow. Yeah. And so for developers, especially in build-to-rent communities or duplex communities, that number is a huge difference maker for them being able to even do the project and do the development. Right. Right. Yep. Wow. So we don't we could we go get the land? Yeah. We've talked to a bunch of people. We've had some stuff under contract off and on. We'd love to pick up, you know, individual lots around town. Yep. Right. That's that's really in the short term what I'd love to do. Um that'll help Topeka, that'll help us, that'll help the communities that they're in. Um, but we're gonna get to that point. There's uh a group out of Colorado, they're using a different printer than we're using, but they're doing similar stuff, and they won't generally take an order that's less than a hundred houses. Nice, okay. Yeah, just because it's they'd rather go do those big developments. Right sure.

Yeah, I mean then your costs would probably go way down.

Yeah, if we can do a larger development, our cost per square foot goes down pretty substantially. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Just because it's a couple we we print under a big tent, it's a couple days to set up the tent, set up the printer, then you gotta take it down, right? And if you're in a development, you can just get a crane and you just lift it from site to site.

Wow. Yep.

Curiosity Led Entrepreneurship And Impact

Wow. One of the things that's fascinating to me about this conversation is kind of the bigger picture about um a lot of people sit in this chair, very entrepreneurial people, and you seem to be a very entrepreneurial person yourself. You see an opportunity, seize the opportunity, and um not that it's only a financial decision, but it seems to be um, you know, a very lucrative opportunity. And uh I'm just I'm fascinated by like I kind of I say this almost every week now. Like I'm just I'm I don't feel like I have a brain that works quite like that. Like seeing like if someone gave me a hundred dollars and said, hey, make $5,000, but like, I don't know, like hope uh, hope Apple can give me a return on this, you know. But there are people who sit in this chair and they're like, oh man, like we could do this, we could do this, we could do this. And it's just fascinating to me. And you seem to have a brain that seems to work like that as well. We're just seeing opportunities. And I'm not saying it's all financial, I don't mean to kind of frame it in that way, but um, but what it what is it about just the way kind of your brain works that where you're seeing, like, man, this is an obvious opportunity to serve the community, meet a need, make money, build a business, you know, that where other people are struggling to like, I don't know what to do, but you're here like, dude, look at all this opportunity. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I for me it's just having a curious mindset, right? So I think I come by it naturally, right? I I've been in consulting and stuff for a long time. My job is to understand problems and and not just like the surface level problem. I'm supposed to, you know, you see the tied up Christmas lights, you know. I'm the type of guy who will spend a while pulling on that yarn to sort of figure out what's really going on. Um interesting. And and it's just a curiosity thing. You know, I'm I'm not a builder by trade. I mean, there's no calluses on my hands, right? That's just not what I've ever really done. I've been adjacent to it for a long time. I have a ton of friends who do it. My stepdad builds beautiful houses, but that just wasn't I'm I'm a business guy. Yeah, but then I started looking at the economics of what we're facing, right? We could have come out and tried to sell these for the same cost per square foot as a stick build, right? And we probably could have sold them at the same price.

Interesting.

But there's a reason, multiple reasons why we don't want to do that. Some of them are societal, right? Myself, I know you guys have talked to uh a bunch of folks in town who have this altruistic streak in them. Right. Yeah, like listen, better housing in our community helps everybody here. Wow. Full full stop. Housing insecurity is a huge problem. Yep. If we can start to address some of that, it makes a lot of stuff better. People will spend more money at small businesses because they are able to afford more of a house. People will stay in jobs longer because they aren't worried about, hey, my my landlord just sold their I don't know who I'm getting now, that kind of stuff. And so that type of security, if you guys remember back to college, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Shelter is at the very base of what people seek to find. And so we can provide that in a meaningful way, right? And yeah, in the first year, 25 to 50 houses, it's it's 25 to 50 houses. But there were only 70 new single family permits pulled last year, and almost all of those sold above $300,000. Wow. That's so the idea is can we add 25 to 50, 100 percent of what we're currently doing to increase that supply? And if we can, it it's gonna make a difference over time.

Yeah. Wow. That's super cool. That's interesting. So it um I yeah, I'm just um it's very interesting what you're saying, because I think a lot of people, you know, that I think about maybe young people trying to kind of make their way in the world and kind of you know, be successful in life. And a lot of times the focus is on, hey, how can I do well? How can I make money? How can I become successful? Um, and obviously you do need to make money, you need to find a way to provide for yourself. But what you're saying is uh, hey, like are like instead of thinking how can I make as much money as possible, think just find a problem and think about that problem until you get a sense of what's really going on and some good ideas around how to solve that, and then just see what happens, is kind of some of what you're saying.