For Immediate Release: February 2008

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH), as part of its mission to promote affordable housing options, funded a study conducted by Optimal Solutions Group (Optimal) to collect information about consumers’ perceptions of four housing types: site-built, modular, manufactured, and panelized. Factory-built housing technologies (i.e. modular, manufactured, and panelized) increasingly allow homebuilders to provide consumers with homes that are less expensive than site-built housing without sacrificing a home’s quality or aesthetic appeal. Yet, such homes represent only 21 percent of housing starts in the United States. Optimal’s report, Factory-Built Construction and the American Homebuyer: Perceptions and Opportunities, identifies what barriers there are to more widespread adoption of these more affordable construction techniques and what education and marketing strategies could be used to overcome any recognized barriers.

In partnership with the National Association of Homebuilders Research Center, Optimal researchers Ken Temkin, Ph.D., Grace Hong, Ph.D. and Laurel Davis, MCP collected data on consumer perceptions and preferences through two surveys, one Web-based and one telephone-based, of a total of nearly 12,700 individuals. Using two different survey formats allowed the research team to analyze the extent to which respondents’ attitudes to a picture of a given type of housing, without knowing how it is constructed, differed from respondents who did not see a picture of a given housing type.

For the full report see http://www.huduser.org/Publications/pdf/Perceptions_of_factory_construction.pdf.

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Optimal Solutions Group, LLC is a nonpartisan, public policy research consulting firm in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. Optimal is committed to supplying insightful program evaluation, cost-benefit and effectiveness analyses, custom econometric modeling, and market analyses for decision makers in both the public and private sectors.

Optimal serves numerous government and commercial clients, including federal and state agencies, community-based organizations, business associations, and law firms. 

For more information, please contact:
Dr. Mark Turner at 301.918.7301, mturner@optimalsolutionsgroup.com. 
Tracye Turner at 301.918.7302, tturner@optimalsolutionsgroup.com.