Yes, you read that right, the home of the future is here today at Wimbledon Properties! Wimbledon Properties L.L.C., a Berkshire Hathaway Company, is owned by Mr. Warren Buffett who started Wimbledon Properties to provide the highest quality housing product on the market at the best possible price to the consumer. Based on his through review of the housing industry, Mr. Buffett determined the best way to accomplish this was to build “system built” homes. What is a System Built Home? You may have also heard this type of home referred to as modular but,“There is really no such thing as a modular home,” states John Thompson, Nashville Region Project Manager for Wimbledon Properties. The literal meaning of the word modular, insinuates a standardized unit or repeatedly used structural component. “The modular homes industry uses system-built technology,” Thompson explains. “The homes are built in a enviromentally controlled environment. They are built in a system.”
This system not only allows for better control of the conditions and labor required to construct a home, the system allows Wimbledon Properties to conduct over 30 detailed inspections at the assembly plant before any component of our homes leaves for the home site. When compared with the normal 5-6 on-site inspections performed on the average stick built home, which are performed on our homes also, you can see why system built is the wave of the future in homebuilding.
Simply put, a Wimbledon Properties system built home produces a home that is built in a controlled enviroment, by highly experienced craftsmen, using quality components, in assembly-line fashion. When completed the home is transported to the building site in large (Modular) units. These units are then lifted from the transport by crane and installed on a site-built foundation and assembled together, again by experience craftsmen, to produce a home that is much “tighter” than the normal stick built home, you can feel it. As an added bonus to both the builder and buyer the entire system built production process takes much less time than it takes to “stick” build a house on-site, the finished product will be far superior and will cost less in the long run.
Wimbledon Properties has a very good inventory of new system built homes throughout middle Tennessee and we will also build any home from our current plan inventory on any of our available lots (dependent on floorplan selected fitting in building envelope of building site). In this situation, when the buyer has selected a floorplan, our production team begins building the home in our assembly plant, it usually take just 3 to 4 weeks to complete all modules and make them ready for transport. As the work in the assembly plant is taking place, the on-site construction of the home’s foundation and underground infrastructure by a Wimbledon Properties on site project manager is being done to ready the site for the arrival of the home. “Because the foundation and underground utility work is being done on-site as the home is being built in the assembly plant, the overall construction time is dramatically reduced,” says Thompson.
The system built home is then shipped to the site on flatbed trucks. The individual modular units are then placed by crane onto the foundation, and the entire home is fastened together. At this point, the amount of time until the homeowner can move in depends on a number of things. “Some customers want to put on custom trims, or finish the basement,” says Thompson. There are plumbing and electrical tie-ins to address as well. Completion time after the units have been placed can be anywhere from a couple weeks for simple designs to 90 days or more for complex custom jobs. The average completion time from initial order to move-in is roughly three months, compared to an average completion time of about six months to a year for a site-built home. |