American Housing Corp. is a vertically integrated real estate developer and manufacturing company based here that aims to construct pre-built “townhomes” in desirable urban neighborhoods across the United States.

The factory-made components—such as pre-wired insulated wall panels, floors, stairs, roofing—are designed to be flat-packed in shipping containers and trucked to worksites where they are fitted together “like Lego” sets, says CEO and co-founder Riley Meik, to form three-story row houses.

The company’s goal is to mass-produce “good homes in good neighborhoods at good prices,” one employee told me during a tour of AHC’s cavernous, 50,000-square-foot factory and the model townhouse next-door.

Meik reckons that AHC can build housing at 30% to 50% of a conventional homebuilder’s cost. A mechanical engineer by training, Meik quit Brigham Young University to start Evolution Space, a rocket-launching company propelling payloads into suborbital space for scientific research.

He was subsequently hired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to work on Starship’s aeronautic flaps. A trio of co-founders with experience in manufacturing, engineering, software, and real estate development round out AHC’s leadership team.

Cornell-educated Will Davis is vice president of software engineering and an alumnus of General Motors. Bobby Fijan, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, helms the real estate acquisition division; he cut his entrepreneurial teeth at a Philadelphia-area real estate partnership overseeing office-to-residential conversions.

Special projects director Harris Rothaermel, a BYU grad and college friend of Meik, is a computer scientist with experience in aerospace at both NASA and Varda Space Industries.

The enterprise has won favorable attention from the venture capital community: Flux Capital, Antler, and Boost Capital Partners have ponied up $7 million in pre-seed and seed capital.

Meik reports, moreover, that a $10 million-plus Series A financing is in the works. That capital infusion will enable AHC to build a 230,000-square-foot factory capable of producing the 1,200 townhouses the company hopes to erect annually, its near-term goal.

“We’re hiring,” Meik tells Realtor.com in a sit-down interview at the company’s headquarters. “We’re looking for people passionate about solving the housing crisis.”

Realtor.com: You were talking about having worked in rocketry and at SpaceX. Is there a segue between what you were doing at SpaceX and housing?

Meik: Three things. While I was at SpaceX, I was living in Los Angeles. Lots of housing gets built on the outskirts of L.A. But in areas like Hawthorne or Manhattan Beach, new housing hasn’t been built for a long time.

Watching some homes get built and seeing people swinging hammers and nails, I started thinking about how inefficient homebuilding is. I started thinking: How do we turn the housing crisis into an engineering problem?

RDC: Could you elaborate?

Meik: There has been so much evolution and progress over the past 50 years introducing robotics and automation into the production process, making it easier and more cost-effective to produce higher-quality products.

Look at housing during that same timeline: Quality has been going down while cost has been going up. It’s the opposite. With consumer electronics, cars, airplanes, rockets—so much of the work is done by machines, not by humans. The structure of a home is significantly more simple, yet everything is built by hand on site.

RDC: What is the third component?

Meik: Vertical integration. If you look at SpaceX or Tesla, they are the best examples of phenomenal, vertically integrated companies. Every single part is produced in-house. Everything is owned from tip to tail by this one entity.

You see raw material comes in one door, a car goes out the other. They don’t even go through dealerships; they sell direct to the consumer.

RDC: Tell me about the building material, magnesium oxide. How did you develop it?

Meik: Lots of trial and error. Our wall panels (are) a good case study. They’re what’s referred to as a
“structural insulated panel.” It’s essentially two structural skins with foam in the middle. So it’s just a sandwich.

There’s only three ingredients: structural skin, foam, and then glue that holds everything together. It’s very easy to automate, and it becomes one structural panel. A wall has to resist a bunch of loads. You have axial loads, the weight of the building. You have sheer loads when the wind blows and hits the house. You have thermal loads; when it’s hot, you want to keep the house cool. You’ve got
acoustic properties.

If you have row homes, you don’t want to hear your neighbor. You need something that’s fire-resistant. How can we do all of those things with a nice, flat paintable surface where you can hang your TV and pictures of your kids, and be mass-produced?

Then we came across magnesium oxide board. It’s a hard material that’s reinforced with fiberglass. It’s got a Class-A fire rating. Combined with the foam, it has really good acoustic properties (and) thermal properties. When you paint it, it looks beautiful.

RDC: And cost was, of course, a consideration.

Meik: A big consideration. There were other options but were more expensive.

RDC: What about the foundations?

Meik: So our foundations are typical. Our floor system is different than a typical house. Most homes are using lumber for everything, studs and plywood for walls, trusses or joists for your floor. We use a cold-form steel product for our floor system, and then we use that same magnesium oxide panel as the subfloor and as the ceiling.

Usually you have screws holding everything together. We use rivets (which) are more common in aerospace and automotive. We’re using the same faucets and the same outlets; but in terms of the actual building itself, it’s very different than a typical house.

RDC: How did you hit upon the townhouse as a model?

Meik: Good question. We all felt very strongly that the key to solving the housing crisis in the U.S. is figuring out how to build “missing middle” housing at scale in the country’s most desirable cities and neighborhoods. The row home was a way to build family-sized housing in a more dense way than typical, single-family homes that are detached with big backyards and big driveways.

We believe that the best way to solve the housing crisis is building family-sized housing in places that people actually want to live: L.A., San Francisco, New York, Seattle, or Austin, where a young family is looking to buy a starter home that they can afford in a good neighborhood.

RDC: I know Austin recently reduced zoning from, was it 5,700 square feet to 1,800?

Meik: One of the big reasons that I chose Austin is you can build up to three homes on any single-family lot. In order for this solution to work, you need the regulators to make it legal to build higher-density housing.

And we need to build at a cost that makes the project pencil and is actually affordable. Austin was an ideal fit. You can get great talent here, and you can get permits relatively quickly.

RDC: Do you have a number off the top of your head for the time it takes for a permit?

Meik: For home initiative projects, most of them are in the two- to four-month range in Austin. But you’ll be surprised if you look at even L.A. County, the number of times that you find a single-family home built on a property that’s zoned for multifamily.

There are thousands and thousands of properties in desirable cities where you could build on them by right just by building more densely.

RDC: And you think politically, they’ll be accepted?

Meik: Definitely. What are people going to say? “I don’t want young families moving into my neighborhood?” I think this is one of the reasons that we focus on building a product that looks nice. We want to make it as easy as possible for cities and neighborhoods to let us build there.

RDC: Tell me about the actual economics. I think I heard your cost of labor is 10 times less (than conventional homebuilding).

Meik: Yeah. Once the parts actually arrive on site, if you were to count the number of labor hours that go into building a typical house. If there’s five people on site for an hour, that’s five labor hours. We use a tenth of the labor of standard construction on site.

So significantly less labor (expense), which obviously plays a big part in lower construction costs. But it really depends on the market and obviously supply and demand, and sometimes labor is just more expensive because the area is more expensive.

RDC: I hear that you were building out a prototype? Is it just a demonstration?

Meik: About a half-hour from here. It’s less of an external demonstration, more of an opportunity for us to test improvements to the system. After we finished building the first house, we had a list of improvements we wanted to make to the components themselves and to the factory.

We spent a few months in the weeds, making improvements to the design of our parts, making improvements to the factory. And then once we felt that we had arrived at a more mature version of the system, then we decided to build another house. But our first homes that we will be selling to customers will be here in Austin proper, and we’ll be sharing more about that later this year.

RDC: You had said that there was powerful alumni and source of talent growing out of the Elon Musk nest, or orbit.

Meik: We do have some people who work here now that came from the Musk ecosystem. That’s part of the reason that we chose to build a company in Austin. You’ve got Tesla’s Gigafactory. You have The Boring Company, so a lot of great engineers there. You have the Starlink factory in (the nearby city of) Bastrop, also phenomenal engineering talent. And then Starbase in South Texas.

Elon has definitely played a very big role in making Austin not just a great place for tech companies, but specifically companies that are trying to build physical things in the real world and manufacturing at scale.

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Pacific Urban Investors picked up a seven-story apartment building in Koreatown for $139 million — $50 million less than it sold for seven years ago.

The Palo Alto-based investor bought Next on Sixth, a 398-unit complex at 620 South Virgil Avenue, Bisnow and CoStar News reported. The seller was Chicago-based real estate investment trust Equity Residential.

The deal for the nine-year-old building works out to nearly $349,250 per unit, not including the 20,000-square-foot retail store. The brokers involved in the sale were not disclosed.

Equity bought the building in 2019 for $189 million, or nearly $474,900 per unit.

The deal was the second largest of the year in Los Angeles County behind Holland Partner Group’s February purchase of a 344-unit apartment building in Duarte for $141 million, or nearly $410,000 per unit.

Next on Sixth was built in 2017 by Century West Partners, a joint venture by Fifield Companies and Cypress Equity, which paid $20.8 million for the site. The firm, led by Michael Sorochinsky, then became embroiled in a $315,000 contractor’s dispute over unpaid work.

The luxury apartment complex includes a Target retail location, a fitness center, coffee bar, screening room and an indoor simulated golf range. Its studio, one- and two-bedroom units, with hardwood floors and floor-to-ceiling windows, rent for between $1,907 and $3,770 a month, according to Redfin.

The average rent in Koreatown stands at $1,970 per month, 18 percent below the average for greater Los Angeles, according to CoStar data. Vacancy is just above the regional average, at 5.9 percent. 

Equity Residential said the heavily discounted Next on Sixth sale was part of its strategy to sell “older, capital-intensive assets or assets [within] heavy concentrations” to pay for stock buybacks and other priorities, Equity Residential CEO Mark Parrell said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call. 

The REIT owns three other residential buildings in Koreatown, which range from 200 to 300 units. 

Equity Residential and AvalonBay Communities announced in May that they would merge into a new company with a $69 billion multifamily behemoth with 180,000 units and 10,800 units in the pipeline. The merger, with a projected $52 billion equity market capitalization, is expected to close this year.

Landlords across the nation struggle with high supply, low rent growth and operating costs that outpace rental incomes, with a local exodus of mom-and-pop shops.

Pacific Urban Investors, founded in 1998 by Alfred Pace and George Marcus, has $9.3 billion in assets under management, including 23,500 apartments in 15 states, according to its website.

– Dana Bartholomew

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Olson Urban Housing wants to swap offices for 159 townhomes in a new gated community in Monterey Park.

The Seal Beach-based unit of Olson Homes has filed plans to build the two- and three-story attached homes on 8 acres at 601 Potrero Grande Drive and 2100 Saturn Street, north of the 60 Freeway, according to Urbanize Los Angeles and city documents.

The project would replace two vacant medical office buildings totalling 120,200 square feet, built in 1980 and 2004. It’s not clear when and for how much Olson paid for the property.

Plans call for 159 attached townhomes with a dozen two-, three- and four-bedroom floor plans between 1,100 and 2,000 square feet. Each home would include a two-car garage. A rendering shows white and gray buildings with large windows and narrow doors and balconies.

The project would include 143 market-rate homes and 16 moderate-income affordable homes.

The market-rate homes would average 1,600 square feet, with two to four bedrooms and 2.5 to 3.5 bathrooms. The affordable units would be nearly 1,300 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.

Olson seeks a density bonus to build a larger project than allowed by zoning rules in exchange for setting aside eight units for very low-income households. The plans include nine live-work or work-from-home spaces.

The townhome project, designed by KTGY, would feature contemporary units built around private walkways and driveways, surrounded by a locked gate. 

Olson is developing a number of similar projects across Los Angeles County, including another housing complex with KTGY in San Gabriel, according to Urbanize.

This month, the developer paid $8.1 million for a 1.9-acre parking lot owned by a church in Yorba Linda with plans to build 40 affordable townhomes.

Olson Homes, founded by Stephen Olson in 1988, focuses on building affordable infill projects across Southern California. The firm has built more than 11,000 homes in 100 cities across the state. 

– Dana Bartholomew

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If you’re looking for a newly built home in the city, there are typically fewer options than in the suburbs.

Suburban building dominates the current market for new homes, with only 10% of new-construction homes for sale in urban areas, compared with 30% of existing homes, according to the Realtor.com® quarterly New Construction Insights analysis.

The few new builds in urban areas tend to command a hefty premium compared to nearby existing homes—with that premium rising as high at 300% in Miami, the report found.

Nationally, urban new builds easily outprice all other kinds of existing homes. New urban builds command prices 78.4% higher than existing urban homes. The median listing price of urban new construction tops $738,000, compared to the median price of existing urban homes, which are $414,000.

Rural areas see a similar trend. The median price for new construction there is $459,000 compared to $299,000 for existing homes. Suburban and smaller-town new-construction and existing-home prices are closer to parity.

Those prices reflect the demand for homes in urban areas, as well as the difficulty in delivering new homes in them, Realtor.com found.

The premium for new construction is highest in Miami

New York City sees the largest share of new urban construction listings at 69.6%, edging out Miami-Fort Lauderdale at 69.5%. But Miami’s new urban construction premium—305.2%—far outpaces New York‘s 106.8%.

That’s because the median listing price for a new urban home in the Miami metro topped $2.57 million, compared to a $459,000 median listing for an existing urban home.

“The housing market remains caught in the tension between the underlying demand and constrained affordability,” Stuart Miller, CEO of homebuilder Lennar Corp., said in a March earnings call. Lennar is the largest homebuilder in the Miami area, according to data from the South Florida Business Journal.

“Supply is still critically short, and years of underproduction have created a structural deficit that will take years to close,” Miller said. “But we believe the conditions are building for an eventual recovery.”

Miami is at the head of a set of metros, a mix of expensive coastal metros and affordable inland ones, where the median listing for a new urban build is multiples of an existing one. The Florida metros of North Port-Bradenton and Tampa-St. Petersburg, as well as St. Louis, also see a 200% premium on new urban homes versus existing ones.

Rounding out the top five is San Francisco-Oakland, where 68.9% of new-construction listings are urban and at a premium of 30.1%. Los Angeles has an urban share of 68.8% and a new-construction premium of 42.4%. New Orleans has an urban share of 62.4% and a new-construction premium of 24.9%.

These areas buck the trend of housing construction concentrated in large new communities on the city’s outskirts. Instead, they feature many urban ZIP codes with little empty land around them, Realtor.com found.

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The price escalation has put pressure on cities to build more urban housing. Over a dozen states are considering or have passed laws aimed at cutting regulations and allowing for smaller “starter” homes. Many of these laws curtail caps on lot sizes, setbacks, and other regulations that drive up prices and complicate new builds.

And Congress is working through its own comprehensive housing bill with dozens of provisions aimed at deregulation. But it’s now stalled between the two chambers over several major differences—notably, a prospective ban on institutional investors in the housing market, which builders fear constrains supply.

“Light-touch density” is coming to the fore because it helps constrain the rising costs of homes, said Arthur Gailes, a research fellow with the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Policy Center. Denser infill, townhomes, and other types of structures ultimately come at a lower cost than new McMansions.

And infill building generates more tax revenue. New-construction homes pay 25% more in property taxes than existing stock, Gailes said on a Tuesday call.

So large, older, and built-out cities benefit the most from promoting infill densification, he said.

“On the other end of the spectrum, areas in the Sun Belt, Florida and Texas, have more opportunity via new residential subdivisions,” Gailes said. “Because they’re building on more on greenfield land, out from the city cores, and allowing more density in these areas.”

Several dozen townhomes are slated to rise on an empty lot in Pomona. 

G3 Urban is seeking approval for its Foothill Place plan, which calls for the construction of 59 attached condominium units at 700 East Foothill Boulevard, Urbanize Los Angeles reported, citing an environmental notice recently issued by the City of Pomona. 

The homes would consist of a mix of two-, three- and four-bedroom floorplans and range from two to three stories. Parking for 127 vehicles is also part of the plan. Architeyk is handling designs for the contemporary townhome-style development. 

In order to qualify for density bonus incentives at the site, G3 Urban would be required to designate 11 percent of the new homes for purchase by moderate-income households. In Los Angeles County, moderate-income is generally defined as making a maximum of 120 percent of the local area median income, equaling $89,550 for one person or $127,900 for a household of four. 

The project marks the latest such development from G3 Urban. The Gardena-based firm has proposed a similar townhome-style project in Artesia, calling for 120 homes across 22 buildings on a 3.5-acre site, Urbanize Los Angeles previously reported. 

Other developers have projects in Pomona in recent months besides Foothill Place. 

Trumark Homes is looking to build 228 total homes, including 68 single-family homes and 160 apartments, on the western side of Elephant Hill in Pomona, Urbanize Los Angeles reported last month. The so-called Elephant Hill project would span nearly 52 acres and include a private recreation center and hillside overlooks facing homes below. Work on the Elephant Hill project is expected to begin this August and finish by October 2031. 

Cape Point Development has also floated building 127 for-sale homes on a 5.5-acre site at 3101 North Garey Avenue, Urbanize reported in November. That development, designed by Architeyk, calls for a mix of duplexes and townhomes with a combination of two, three and four bedrooms.— Chris Malone Méndez

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Rudin secured a new, long-term headquarters lease with construction company Urban Atelier Group at 41 Madison Ave. in Midtown South’s Flatiron District. The tenant signed a 15-year lease for 25,268 square feet and plans to relocate from its current 18,000-square-foot headquarters at 85 Fifth Ave. in the second quarter of 2025.

This marks Rudin’s third lease at 41 Madison over the past few months. In June, law firm Clarick Gueron Reisbaum, LLP took 13,394 square feet, and Polar Asset Management Partners, Inc. expanded its footprint ito 9,761 square feet.

“Our century-long ownership model focuses on providing an elevated product with premium workspaces in prime locations,” said Michael Rudin, Co-CEO of Rudin. “We welcome Urban Atelier Group to 41 Madison, whose headquarters commitment builds on the great leasing momentum we have experienced since the completion of our capital improvement program.”

SVP Robert Steinman represented building ownership in-house. Urban Atelier Group was represented by Ross Eisenberg of RDE Advisors.

Urban Stearns and Forbix have secured a $17.5 million loan to begin converting a 12-story office building in San Pedro into more than 200 homes.

The Culver City- and Calabasas-based investors secured the bridge loan to launch construction of the 294,000-square-foot office-to-home conversion at 226 West Sixth Street, Bisnow and the Torrance Daily Breeze reported.

Lenders BH3 Management and F2 Capital provided the financing for pre-development costs associated with the adaptive reuse project. Terms of the loan were not disclosed. 

Urban Stearns and Forbix bought the former Logicon and Northrop Grumman building in March last year for $28.9 million. The sellers were Long Beach-Based Harbor Associates and Platform Ventures, which purchased it in 2019 for $43.5 million, then walked its way through its conversion approvals.

The two-tower property, built in 1990, takes up a full city block and includes 30,000 square feet of ground-floor shops and restaurants, with parking for 650 cars. 

Plans for the so-called Topaz Tower would convert the offices into 244 studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments. It would include outdoor balconies with ocean views and a rooftop deck with a resort-style pool. Units will average 839 square feet.

The project is expected to be completed late next year.

The building is two blocks from the 42-acre West Harbor waterfront redevelopment, now under construction. Both the new building and West Harbor are expected to open in 2025.

The planned office-to-apartment conversion is in keeping with current trends since a broad shift to remote work, though few projects have been completed, according to Jonathan Fhima, CEO of F2.

While such conversions can be challenging to execute, they are not impossible, according to Bisnow.

Greater Los Angeles had 2,442 office-to-home conversion units planned for this year, up 6 percent from last year, according to a RentCafe report. 

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Jamison Services, a leading developer of office-to-home conversions, wants to turn the former ARCO tower in Downtown Los Angeles into apartments. The Koreatown-based company filed plans to convert the 33-story office building at 1055 West 7th Street into 691 apartments.

Last month, Jamison filed plans to convert the 19-story Los Angeles Superior Court Tower at 600 South Commonwealth Avenue into 428 homes.

— Dana Bartholomew

Real estate software development company Cedar announced this week that it has secured $3 million in seed funding to create a product that would help developers locate urban infill properties for potential development into housing.

The company said it believes urban development complexities are pushing the construction of new housing further out of urban centers, contributing to an imbalance between supply and demand and, by extension, affordability challenges.

“Not only is the U.S. not building enough housing to support our population growth, we’re not building homes in the right places — urban centers where current and future generations want to live and work, and be closer to their friends, family and cultural amenities,” said Cedar co-founder Kyle Vansice.

Caffeinated Capital led the funding round, while Tishman Speyer Ventures also participated alongside individual investors Maria Davidson (CEO of Kojo), David Rubenstein via Shorewind Capital and Alumni Ventures.

Cedar says its platform’s functionality includes using “generative algorithms and a mix of public and proprietary data to quickly generate a broad array of building designs, accurately predicting the development yield on any parcel in a city, and converting complex land-development regulations into real development scenarios that maximize a property’s financial potential.”

The opportunity for developers is to focus on places “that were previously built for largely single-family development, but offer the potential to dramatically densify to create more livable and walkable neighborhoods,” the company said.