Anthony Gude is Director of Real Estate Development at Leap of Faith Partners. Leap of Faith was founded in Los Angeles in 2013 and is at the forefront of delivering single family, multifamily and low to mid-rise modular housing in the LA area. They have a focus on providing affordable modular housing and have delivered 200,000 square feet of modular buildings. The team is currently working on a 125-unit multifamily project in Ventura, California with hundreds of units in the pipeline. LA and the State of California experiencing a major affordable housing shortage, which is only expected to grow over the coming years, Anthony and his team have many more projects to come.

Offsight sat down with Anthony to get his perspective on LA’s role as an epicenter for building modular affordable housing and also how technology can play a crucial role in facilitating faster adoption of offsite construction methods. 

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A: Many of the entitlement and planning policies that accelerate conventional development do the same for Modular.There is a level of recognition that the case studies reflect that Developers that use modular solutions like Leap of Faith Partners, Sola Impact , and Impact Housing and others continue to outperform conventional projects financially. The continued development and housing friendly acceleration of the entitlement and permitting progress at the local level is necessary to meet demand. At the federal level, Industrialized construction incentives are being considered and it is likely the best fit in moving the needle. All cities have to do is promote development that supports and creates community. Naturally , the performance of the best projects will bring Industrialized construction and modular projects to the top of the list. The late adopters of technology end up where they always do, seeking reform to subsidize substandard performance in the market.

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A: For us, creating a massive pipeline revolves around the ability to quickly perform accurate costing analysis and develop a proforma close to the final version as early in the process as possible. Because our construction and acquisition teams work closely but have entirely different workflows, technologies that translate early massing to quantifiable construction elements allow us to have accurate proformas based on more than “historic price per square foot”. More specificity means more predictability for investors & more dealflow we can quickly underwrite for acquisition. Using modular processes compounds this, in that we have our production capacity secured in much the same way we secure deal pipeline and can quickly not just use past data, but have a live connection to a single supply chain partner with business relationships driving economies of scale and cost of the project.

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A: Certainly a competitive advantage. The status quo of the industry is that operators and developers allow scope and cost creep because it is “part of the business”. The truth is that it is not, and being able to manage scope and costs accurately through a complex offsite project is one of the advantages of technology like Offsight.

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Additionally, investors can attain more scale and housing output by focusing on transparency and predictability that is only available by consolidating the investor base. Now, if an operator is not, or has not committed to that radical simplification of their processes OR has historic relationships or business structure that prevents them from doing so – this is the limitation that keeps their financial performance from exceeding those that leverage modular, panelization, or more simply put: Best-in-class project management.