Aaron Holm, a former product manager with Amazon, is now the CEO of Blokable, a Seattle company that produces modular housing units that feature smart home technology.
GeekWire reports that the manufactured homes, called Bloks, are easier and faster to build, and are intended to be a solution for affordable housing concerns in dense, expensive markets such as Seattle, Portland, and Silicon Valley. While with Amazon, Holm noticed that many of the company’s new hires were struggling to find and afford a place to live, in large part due to a lack of housing.
Blokable will make single-family homes, accessory dwelling units, and market-rate apartment buildings. Bloks are between 18 and 38 feet long and contain premium kitchens and bathrooms, along with deck, stair, railing, temperature, and lighting systems. The units are trucked in from Vancouver.
Holm compared the way we build housing today with how computers used to be put together: completely customized, leading to a lengthy building process. Holm sees an opportunity to bring a technology and factory mindset to housing construction, speeding up building times.
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