Phil Dodd
Prefabricated, factory-built housing is increasingly being used as a partial solution to solving the housing shortage. It’s an approach already dominant in Sweden. About 84% of Swedish detached homes have prefabricated elements, compared to 5% in the U.S., according to architizer.com.
The Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development says factory-built housing could be a “game-changer” for Vermont. Among the benefits the agency cites predictable costs and timing, quality control, year-round production, expanded construction workforce, and positive local economic impact.
As it happens, one of the major prefab housing companies in New England, Huntington Homes, is local. At its 100,000-square-foot, climate-controlled shop at 344 Fassett Road in East Montpelier, the company employs 75 people and cranks out about 75 buildings a year.
Huntington is now in the spotlight because one of the four potential developers of Montpelier’s Country Club Road (CCR) property, Execusuite, is proposing to include 125 or so Huntington buildings in its project, such as accessory dwelling units, cottages, mid-size houses, and multi-family properties.
The Execusuite plan includes a substantial number of affordable homes, which Huntington Homes Co-President Jason Webster calls “starter” homes.
“There were a lot of starter homes built in the ’70s and ’80s, but almost none since then,” he said. “Vermont builders have instead been focusing on the high end of the market.”
“I think it is a great project, and I hope it moves forward,” Webster said of the Execusuite plan. “It checks a lot of boxes and it builds a lot of houses across a wide range that we desperately need.” Prices can be kept affordable because the land is essentially free to the developer and the infrastructure will be paid for by the state’s new CHIP program, a unique situation, he noted.
Huntington History
Huntington Homes was started in 1978. Webster’s father was part of the team that ran the company, and he eventually purchased the firm in the early 1990s. Webster said he and his brother, Adam Webster, started working for the company in 2003, and later purchased it from their father.
Since its founding, Huntington has built about 5,000 homes. Because some of the 75 buildings it constructs every year are multi-family, the number of units built per year is around 100, Webster said. The factory could potentially build twice as many a year, he added.
One key market has been Nantucket, where Huntington has sold about 600 homes. The costs of getting lumber to the island and finding local builders means it can be less expensive to ship prefab homes by barge, Webster said.
“The majority of what we have built out there has been workforce housing and housing for locals,” he noted.
Like Nantucket, Vermont has become a very expensive place to build, partly “because it’s desirable,” he said. “Huntington, using prefab and modular housing, has been a way to leverage offsite manufacturing efficiencies to lower costs.”
“Prefab” is a term for housing built off-site, Webster said. “It includes modular homes, which is what we do, but also panelized construction, log homes, timber frame, and even straw bale.”
Huntington builds in modules of 400 to 700 square feet, which can be free-standing or combined into larger buildings. Each module is started at one end of the factory and then rolled along from station to station, with the last station adding doors, kitchens, and bathrooms.
It takes about 96 hours to build a house in the factory, according to Webster, and houses come off the assembly line at a regular pace. Unlike a stick-built home constructed on site, Huntington can keep building regardless of the weather, allowing for a more predictable
schedule.
“We don’t have to shovel snow to start the day,” he said. “We’re not waiting for driveways to be sanded to get lumber deliveries. We don’t have to stop because it’s raining out.”
Another plus for the factory-built model, according to the Agency for Commerce and Community Development website: “Home production on an assembly line reduces barriers for workers historically marginalized from the construction industry.”
Additionally, the process is more predictable and comfortable for the firm’s 55 factory workers, many of whom work in tee-shirts year-round, Webster said.
The company mostly hires by word of mouth.
“We had a woman start here who then brought in her husband and her son,” he said. “We had a recently retired employee who brought in his two sons to work here.” Employees get benefits including health insurance, vacations, and sick time, he added.
Huntington sells to individual owners, but also works with developers. Right now, Huntington is involved in a housing project in Middlebury called Stonecrop Meadows that is offering both homes for sale and rentals. “Our involvement in that project is about 50 units, spread between six-unit townhomes, some four-unit buildings and duplexes,” Webster said.
The company is also building 22 single-family homes for a project in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, for Dartmouth faculty housing.
“Both of those developers are saying that they’re delivering to the buyer for less money than they would have had they stick-built the entire project on site,” Webster said.
Vermont Housing Finance Agency Executive Director Maura Collins agrees with that assessment. “Manufactured and modular homes are high quality and cost less than on-site construction, bringing down the price and allowing more renters to become first-time homebuyers,” she said in a January 2025 press release.
Execusuite
Huntington offers a variety of home designs, including about 75 of what it calls “stock homes.” Execusuite, one of the potential developers of the city’s Country Club Road property, has identified 17 of those Huntington stock homes it would like to include in the project.
Execusuite plans for about 125 Huntington buildings to be used on the project. Unit sizes would range from 624 square feet to 2,128 square feet, with prices ranging from $340,000 to $645,000 and a median price of $395,000, according to Execusuite. The cheapest non-Huntington owned unit in the proposed project would be a $155,000, two-story 370-square-foot home from Sweet Dreams Microhomes. While the majority of the prefab buildings in the project would be provided by Huntington, Execusuite has identified several other prefab housing manufacturers it would like to potentially include, including Brushwood, Foam Laminates, New Frameworks Sweet Dreams, Timberhomes, and UpEndThis, all of them Vermont-based.
Many properties would be owned homes, but some would be rentals or rented until they sell, according to Execusuite. The developer is also exploring a rent-to-own option.
Webster said his firm definitely has the capacity to build the homes Execusuite would like to order.
“We are booked through the end of this year,” he said. “But after that we are going to build 75 buildings a year for somebody.”
In his opinion, Webster said, developers utilizing factory-built homes “are on the forward end of realizing the labor shortage that is across the entire construction industry.” He noted Huntington buys materials wholesale and says they can build more efficiently.
Webster is a fan of building starter homes.
“An entire generation has missed out on the ability to build equity through homeownership that prior generations had,” said. “Collectively, as a society, we need to figure out how we can support homeownership to this whole group of people that has been missing out.”
The cost for individuals to buy a lot and build a home has gotten out of hand, he said. “Look at someone trying to build a one-off single-family home in Middlesex. Right off the bat, after buying the land at some expense, they are facing up to $150,000 in infrastructure costs to bring in power, drill a well, bring in a driveway, and then do excavation and grading work. When I started doing sales 23 years ago, those costs may have been more like $30,000.”
Developing projects that include public infrastructure, which the new state CHIP program is intended to promote and which Country Club will likely provide to the developer, is one answer to that problem, Webster said.
“We spent the last 20 years requiring that every new housing project pay for itself,” he said. “And so every new project has to build its own roads and has to bring in its own septic and bring in its own water. What we’ve gotten out of that are houses that few people can afford.”
