Travis Colbert and his wife, Ann, watched their new home descend from the sky, dangling on the end of a crane. Construction workers, clad in orange safety vests, pulled at ropes attached to each corner of the building, carefully guiding it to its final resting place on a pre-laid foundation.
It felt surreal to stand on the excavator as the prefabricated home settled onto a dirt plot on the couple’s seven acres in Ohio Meadows, Travis said.
The 1,500 square-foot prefabricated home was built by Colorado-based company SmartPads and cost the couple just over $400 a square foot. The company offers modular, customizable units for local families seeking their first-ever home or buyers looking for an investment property.
The price, while still at the top end of their budget, was just reasonable enough to make the project possible, Travis said. Prior to finding SmartPads, he said they had nearly given up on the possibility of owning a home in Gunnison County. Travis, owner of Tributary Coffee Roasters, and Ann, a teacher in the Gunnison Watershed School District, have been in Gunnison Valley for over a decade.
“It was just so discouraging, like maybe this isn't even possible.” Travis said.
In Gunnison County, the cost to build — not just to buy — has soared over the last several years. Pandemic-era supply chain delays, labor costs and the continued difficulties of an affordable housing crisis have made the prospect all but unachievable for many blue collar workers in the valley. For the Colbert’s, SmartPad’s prefabricated home removed the uncertainty of homebuilding by offering a fixed cost and fixed timeline, making the prospect of owning a home in the valley real.
An ‘attainable’ solution
The couple never imagined they would need much space, Travis said. But when they inquired about the cost of a 1,300 square-foot home, they were told it would run them nearly a million dollars, over double their budget. And the contractors who called him back — one of only a few — estimated a two to three year timeline. The county’s new 2021 International Wildland-Urban Interface Code, which went into effect at the start of 2023, just tacked more costs on.
“I hear story after story of what starts as $500,000 becomes $600,000 or $700,000. It just seems like the price just keeps escalating,” Travis said.
They eventually gave up on the on-site build and started looking into prefabricated homes. After a good amount of googling, they found SmartPads. The company’s “pay to play” process offers a sliding scale of luxury — or affordability — from $300,000 to over $2 million. The level of interior design and added amenities are up to the buyer. In addition to the cost of buying the land, homebuyers still need to prepare the site, install the foundation, oversee installation and handle all local permitting.
Ryan Cox and his business partner Darrin Fryer started SmartPads six years ago when they saw the price of homebuilding in their native Steamboat Springs start to climb. To offer a workable solution to locals and also accommodate high-budget clients, they created the customizable, modular homebuilding process. They have already built and sent over 50 homes around Colorado and Montana, as close as Crested Butte, Buena Vista, Salida and Ridgway.
“Like all mountain communities, we struggle with affordability on new builds,” Cox said. “We were intrigued by a different, more streamlined approach.”
The homes are all built using modular construction, a process where standardized parts of a structure are built at an off-site factory and later assembled on-site. SmartPad’s homes are “volumetric modules,” delivered as shipping container-like structures rather than walls and beams. Delivering a nearly-complete home means the buyer can work with a fixed cost and timeline, Cox said.
The company solely serves mountain communities, and the designs reflect the unique challenges of areas that receive heavy snow, harsh temperature drops and are situated at high elevations.
“It can be a mudroom where you have plenty of room for your ski, boots, helmets and winter hats, or how we work with clients to orient the home to ensure we're maximizing solar gain,” he said.
All the homes are manufactured in Vernal, Utah. The desert warehouse is situated nearly halfway between Steamboat Springs and Salt Lake City, a location that allows for more flexible and cost-efficient materials sourcing, Cox said. Unlike rural Gunnison, Vernal is located along a major east-west transcontinental highway, I-40, that connects Utah and Colorado.
From conception to completion, the process takes between six to eight months on average. The SmartPads teams can build the home in the Utah desert while local contractors pour concrete and ready the site for its final home. For Travis, the concurrent timelines meant their home was delivered faster than he could have imagined.
“All the while, I'm fumbling through trying to get a foundation in the ground, and the house is finished. In the three months it took me to figure out how to get a foundation and a well, the house is built and ready to be delivered,” he said.
When the homes arrive at their final resting place, they’re 80-95% complete on the inside. Flooring, cabinets, countertops and sink fixtures are installed, insulation is done and electricity is wired and ready to plug into the grid. These efforts are meant to limit the amount of time and money spent on the home once it arrives at its foundation. Cox estimates that SmartPad’s model translates to 10-20% savings, as opposed to a traditional on-site build.
Even with all the benefits of the SmartPad, it still took a village to make Colbert's house happen, Travis said. Because nearly all the construction was already done, he was able to act as his own general contractor. Through friendly connections from his coffee shop, Tributary Roasters, plumbers, architects and electricians all lent a hand. A “lucky” condo purchase in 2010 gave the couple the sale money they needed to even consider a home.
The Colbert’s moved into their two-module set-up right after Thanksgiving. In the future, the home is also meant to be a space for Ann’s parents when they need more support.
“We've always just dreamed of a place where you could host family and friends or if someone needs a place to stay for a while, we actually would have a place to offer them,” Travis said. “This is like the first time, since we've been married, that we've had a place that you can use in that way.”
(Abby Harrison can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or abby@gunnisontimes.com.)
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