Apartment towers can be built like cars on an assembly line
Whole apartment units are finished in a factory, trucked to the site, and stacked into a tower, which Wong says should mean a shorter schedule.
Business Insider · Meet Cloud Apartments, a startup that promises lower-cost living in factory-made units thanks to backing from a 25-year VC veteranThe fastest way to put up an apartment tower may start nowhere near the building site.
That is the idea behind modular construction, a technique usually used for detached houses. To picture it, think of how automakers build cars. Instead of building each floor on site, workers in a factory build whole apartment units on an assembly line.
Curtis Wong, a 33-year-old who once worked as an engineer at SpaceX and earned a business degree from Harvard and founded the Bay Area rental development company Cloud Apartments in 2021, is betting that the factory can do most of the work. His partner factories, including a modular builder called Autovol, take in raw materials at one end and turn out finished units, with walls, floors, and fixtures already in place.
Those units are then loaded onto trucks, shipped to the building site, and fitted together into a high-rise. Engineers and building specialists put them together, so the tower itself is still raised on site but the rooms arrive largely complete.
The payoff, Wong says, is speed, because prefabrication of the apartment parts "lets you sprint through" putting the tower together, and he argues the compressed schedule should bring costs down sharply.
His numbers are targets, not results. Wong predicts his method will lower building expense by almost a third, and for San Jose he has proposed a tower with 200 homes. He wants to hold expenses to $340 for every square foot, while the typical San Jose figure cited by area builders is $475.
No Cloud building exists yet. Cloud is seeking permission for five locations around the Bay Area: San Jose, Concord, Berkeley, Redwood City, and Watsonville, and is waiting for approval from those cities to start building.
Questions people ask
Why does finishing faster make an apartment cheaper?
Construction loans charge interest every month, and contractors, crane rentals, and site crews are usually paid by the day or week. Cutting months off a project reduces those carrying and labor costs, and it lets a developer start collecting rent sooner.
Are factory-built high-rises as sturdy as regular ones?
They must meet the same state and local building codes for structure, fire safety, and earthquakes. Modules are often built with extra bracing because they have to survive a truck ride and a crane lift, and they are inspected both in the factory and after they are stacked.
If factories are faster, why are most apartments still built on site?
Factories cost a lot to set up, and shipping wide, heavy rooms requires special trucks, permits, and roads that can handle them. Local zoning and approval rules can also add delays that a factory cannot remove, so the savings depend on the project and the city.