Meet Onx Homes, the Startup Building Sustainable Houses in 30 Days

Grant (00:00.054)
sip of water or something or don't worry about it. I'll edit everything out. So I'll get started if you're ready to go.

Ash (00:01.874)
All good, all good.

Okay.

I'm absolutely ready to go.

Grant (00:10.23)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much Ash for joining me today. Really excited to talk about an industry that I read a lot about and kind of just peruse it and try to understand a little bit more because it is a it is very nascent to us all until we actually get to that point in our lives. We want to buy a home and then there's all kind of aspects to it and there's all kind of people involved and you know, a lot of different things. Before we get into Onyx Homes and what it's doing sort of what it's

trying to disrupt what it is disrupting already in a lot of different aspects of the industry. Talk a little bit about your journey, maybe your career path before Onyx Homes and how you got into the industry.

Ash (00:48.004)
Yeah, thanks, Grant, really appreciate this opportunity. And so as my background, I'm a technology executive. I'm a technology founder of various, various companies in my past. Okay. And my journey started when I first moved to United States in 85 from India. And first thing that I noticed was

when I first got to my first apartment, the first day itself, I could punch and my hand could go on the other side of the wall. I mean, that was the first thing I noticed. And it was, and from where I come, everything is built with structure, with concrete and it's solid. And if you punch, you're gonna break your wrist. So that was the first one that I noticed.

Grant (01:29.366)
haha

Ash (01:43.058)
But then, you know, didn't make much of it because that's what everything is done in the United States. I said, maybe this is the way to do it. And, you know, off to my technology journey. And, you know, I previously built out a company called Flextronics. It's called Flex now. Okay. I ran various, various divisions for it. It was one of the largest manufacturing company in the world. Okay. Not building for us, but building for others.

And that's where I learned that in the process of life of electronic product, the prices go down, the prices go down, efficiencies increases, and you pass efficiency to the consumer, and that's how the world operates in that industry. So I built that company out, the company went public and stayed there for 14 years and ran various of their divisions. And post that, I wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I started like almost eight, nine companies.

in AI space and software space and in other spaces and but more to keep away from hardware space, okay, just because it's too capital intensive and it's expensive. So a few of the companies got sold, okay, you know, got sold to other companies, okay, other major companies and few of them are still existing and doing well, okay. And then the time came that, you know, a friend of mine called me who was running one other construction.

Grant (02:45.174)
Wow.

Ash (03:08.146)
related technology company to see what I can do to help in that area. And he wanted me to get some experience outside of United States as well again. So I moved to Middle East and India to look at construction, construction technology. And that's where all of this technology piece of it made sense to me on what can be done around this within the United States. So I'll post that, came back to the US and then started a co -founded Onyx.

Grant (03:11.394)
Hehehehe

Ash (03:37.842)
And the concept is very simple. And that is, like I said, the first learning of mine was your wrist can go to the other side if you box on a wall in the United States. That's number one. Number two is come from electronics industry where the prices come down every year and your efficiency increases. Okay, two. Number three is an

in all the industries that I've been in, technology industries, everything changes every few years. Okay, so those are the three learnings that I had. Then when I looked at the homemaking and homebuilding industry, all three don't work. Okay, in the sense that homes don't last too long. Okay, that's number one. Climate changes happen, okay, which is actually causing the hurricane comes over in Florida and half the homes are gone, at least the roofs are gone, okay.

There's a small fire in the home and guess what? The entire neighborhood is gone. And so those are the real challenges. Then second is the homes are getting built the same way that they were getting built 100 years ago. In fact, even worse. At that point in time, at least the homes were built were stronger and yeah, and now it's cheaper and worse. And it doesn't happen in any other industry. I mean, I come from the industry where the prices go down and efficiency increases. So efficiency is...

Grant (04:48.822)
Yeah. Right. Cheaper and worse now, huh?

Ash (05:02.482)
is all time low in whole home building industry, okay, too. And final learning around all of this for me was, you know, I come from a background where we build around, you know, almost 100 factories in 30, 40 countries around the world, okay, in electronics manufacturing. Supply chain, okay. And the supply chain is so, there's no centralized supply chain in this industry. Everybody is buying from.

moment -pop places, everybody's going and running to home depots at the last minute to put things and the efficiencies of supply chain, efficiencies of cost, efficiencies of how to build it, how to build it in the factory has not been looked into in the right way. And so all of that led me to go found Onyx and it's been a journey. We didn't, I mean, this was like last three years that we started off on this journey. So very, very happy to where we are right now.

Grant (05:57.686)
Wow.

Ash (05:59.89)
So that's my background.

Grant (06:00.374)
Yes. Yeah, so there's so much to touch on. I want to try to touch on a lot of different things. The first would be the industry, you know, as a whole as itself. You mentioned you go went to sort of the Middle East and see how they build it. And I mean, everything there is is I've only been there once and been to Abu Dhabi and, you know, the stuff that they built. I mean, they were building all kind of stuff when we were just there. And it was.

It was different to see how it was being built. But also when my friend who lived there, you know, he was like, things go up really quickly. And I was like, wow, that's sort of quite the opposite. I guess what was what's. What when you came to the US and kind of looked at, OK, I want to start, you know, I kind of I see what we can build. We can build it fast. We can build it efficient. It seems like the technology is there to build a lot of homes and homes that we need to think we have.

Ash (06:54.802)
Yeah. Yeah.

Grant (06:56.438)
3 million home shortage in America. And that the problem of building doesn't seem to be the issue. I guess talk about the industry on the ground at what it takes to get a development built. What are some of the hurdles there that maybe that are maybe not allowing the disruption that sort of needs to happen to get these home built? I guess what is it like in essence? Take a good example of Florida where you're at. Is that a little bit more lenient than other states?

Let's just talk about overall what it takes to get a development built.

Ash (07:29.234)
Yeah, no, no, that's a great question. So, you know, the way to look at this is, you know, like I said, you know, if you go to Europe also, you know, you see these buildings which are built like 400, 500 years ago, okay. And they're still standing and in great shape. People are living in those buildings.

Grant (07:46.486)
I lived in one in Amsterdam and it was, yeah, it was amazing. It was amazing.

Ash (07:49.074)
Thank you.

There you go. So then, you know, the learning that I had in overseas and coming back to the US was in overseas, they do a build with concrete and in some way, they try to automate in a factory some portion of it, but not all. Okay, because labor is still cheap in that part of the world and things so it's still very manual and very labor intensive.

So when we first started, we said, well, our goal has been, and we have proved that, to build homes in less than 30 days. And so we designed a factory, which is, by the way, a very automated factory. I mean, just to give you a perspective, the first factory that we have in Florida, in Miami area, we can build four homes in a day in that factory.

Grant (08:31.158)
Wow.

Ash (08:46.322)
And when I talk about homes, I'm not talking about like small homes. We're talking about 2000 square feet, 2500 square feet. Our biggest square foot home is 3600 square feet. Okay. So, all across the range, I mean, and you know, the way to look at this is, and there are only 18 people in that factory in a shift. Okay. So four homes getting built with 18 people per shift. We're running two shifts for that factory. Okay. And so that, and that factory builds all the walls.

And every piece in the wall, like MEP, even the windows, okay, we put that in the wall in the factory. So there's a wall factory, okay. Then the second factory that we have in Miami is what I call the Ports Factory. So the biggest cost in a home is either building kitchens or building bathrooms, okay, because that's where all the connection, everything comes in play, okay. And we have a bathroom port factory, which is by the way approved by all of Florida, bathroom ports can be used anywhere in the state.

And number three is foundation. So even foundation, we do it in a factory. So it's all very clever designs, very clever. And by the way, just for, we have almost 40 plus patents on technology, what we do, how we do automation, the material science, the materials that we use and all that good stuff. So we took some of the elements which were working in different parts of the world, put it all together with our proprietary technology on top of it.

with our automation on top of it, okay? With our way of doing things to see how we can build a home in less than 30 days. So we are already doing that. We are, just to give you perspective, we have built over 600 homes now. Families are living in there. 600 families are living, 2 ,000 plus people are living in this. These are in two or three different locations, are in and around Miami. So off to a great start. In fact, I was just looking at some of the stats.

some of the technology companies who are in the space and who started before us have not even built 100 homes yet. Okay. And here we are, we delivered, I mean, this quarter alone, last quarter alone, we delivered over 90 homes. Okay. So off to the races. Okay. Now, what are the challenges? That was a great question. Why Florida? I think that was one of the questions that you asked. Okay. Why Florida? And was it easier to start over here? Okay. So first of all, Florida is where the hurricanes come.

Ash (11:13.778)
Okay, that's, well that was it. You can build it there, you can build it anywhere. So that's number one. Okay, number two is, and we want to, and our old story is not only speed, but resilience. Okay. And also saving costs for the consumer on an ongoing basis. Okay, I'll talk about that in a little bit. Second is, we had a partner who had a piece of land over here who I've known from our previous thing. So it just happened to be that it's easy access to the land.

Grant (11:14.614)
If you could build it there, you could build it anywhere, huh?

Ash (11:43.186)
because of his, because he was controlling some pieces of land, okay, so two. And number three is, guess what? Miami -Dade County is probably the toughest county in getting things done. Okay, if you recall, it had two incidences. It had one, about 10 years ago, there was a bridge that came down and then there was, a couple of years ago, there was a building that came down, okay? And since then,

Grant (12:01.174)
Mm -hmm.

Ash (12:06.578)
the county and jurisdiction has been very, very strict around its rules, around regulations and things. So it's a, so I said, if you can do it in Miami -Dade, you can do it in other places in United States. Okay. So that's, that was, so we chose a difficult part, not an easy part, okay, to start off with. Okay. And of course, as you can imagine, you know, there have been positive and negatives around it. Positive is, is that we've been successful in building over here. Okay. And, and

and we've built and we've worked with the cities in the right way to get to that. Okay, even like I said, the pod that we have, bathroom pods are approved for all of Florida. They don't even have to come and inspect it. Okay. It's that proof point that they have given us. Okay. Otherwise, just to get a bathroom into a home, it requires like seven or eight different people coming and inspecting it. Okay. So this is big building a factory. It's just easy for them to inspect it and it's just one and you're gone.

So they've been positive around that. The area that we struggle with, okay, that everybody struggles with is land and land approvals, okay, to get from, you know, there's enough land, by the way. I mean, it's not a short of land, okay. I mean, I see land everywhere, but they are not parceled or they're not done for building housing. And to get approval of that takes a longer time.

Grant (13:17.174)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ash (13:28.946)
And there's a system in place which has been put in place for a long period of time. I'm not blaming Florida. I'm not blaming, it's like all of United States has that issue that has to be dealt with in some given way. And then the governments and the counties and the cities are short of people in getting things done based on the older way. Okay. And I think it's time that to address the housing market. I think it's important that the government plays a good role.

in upgrading its systems, upgrading how it thinks about it, upgrading what are the needs are in that area and approving it faster. Okay, so we can build as fast as we can, but if you don't get approvals, then it's a problem, right? So the good news is we have been successful. Would I have been more successful if we had more government collaboration around it to be able to help us solve absolutely.

Okay, but having said that, not complaining about it, but I think the issue is to solve the housing problem, it has to be some kind of combination of government on permitting side, playing a faster role at the same time, companies like Onyx and Onyx like technology companies building these home faster. So that's, and once we approved the role here, what do we want to do? I mean, we want to go national.

Maybe we want to be national builder. That's our aspiration.

Grant (14:58.934)
Yeah, I was reading that there's a ton of builders, I guess, or developers, but there's a very small amount that actually get the license to approve by these local governments or something like that. I think it was only like, there's like 25 really big.

companies out of these 60 ,000 developers that actually build most of these. And that's why everything looks the same. When you get outside the cities, it all sort of looks the same. It's got all the same things around it. It's because it's sort of these same developers doing it and becomes, culture is sort of lost in the US a little bit because you go somewhere and it's like, this kind of looks the same as the other city outside. This area starts looking the same.

Ash (15:47.186)
Thank you.

Grant (15:51.99)
I think the one thing you said about how we can get the approval stuff faster is that you have it in the factory. You sort of have this blueprint. You mentioned sort of the patents where if the government or whoever comes and takes a look at it to approve it, they only have to kind of do it once rather than doing it for the bathroom, let's say. And then you have certain layouts, I guess, for the home. When we talk about cost,

Ash (16:12.082)
Correct.

Grant (16:21.334)
What does that cost? I mean, I probably have different layouts. I guess walk us through like the cost of it for the end consumer. How do we get that to just sort of up? Because these homes are beautiful. I mean, we'll link everything and we'll show pictures. I mean, they are beautiful homes, you know, climate efficient. There's there's all kinds of sustainability factors to it that we'll sort of get into. But I guess talk about pricing and then we'll get into sort of materials.

Ash (16:30.034)
Thank you.

Ash (16:46.994)
Yeah, so let me, we've been new in the market, right? I mean, some of our competitors have been existing for 80 years, 100 years. So those are, and here we are in three years of life of us, okay? And what are the things that I learned in what I've been doing in the past is that big companies have a business model and for them business model would change. It's very difficult.

It's just that because what is working, why change it? Okay, that's a general attitude. That's what big companies, even every field, okay. And then comes the startup, which looks at it a different way and says, well, why are we doing it this way? Why can't we do this way? Okay. And that's the reason startup world exists, okay. And then startup world happened to change the industry over a period of time. And that's what we are hoping to be that change. Okay, so that's number one.

Cost, okay, now cost factor is, since we were new in the marketplace, obviously we can take, we have been able to take the cost out of the system a lot, okay. You know, the way we build it, wastage is minimal, okay. I mean, just a traditional construction has got about 20 % wastage on the site because everything is built on the site, okay. And it causes a lot of wastage. If you're building in a factory, there's zero wastage, okay, in a factory, hardly any wastage.

Grant (18:06.678)
Yeah.

Ash (18:14.066)
So that's one. So you're saving on the waste. Second is, since it's very automated and things and we don't need as much people on the site and we are doing it in the factory in a more efficient way, we save on the labor cost, okay? Number three is materials that we use, okay, are sourced worldwide in a way because that was my learning in my past life that you go worldwide to find the right materials and right things.

and have the supply chain honed. So we have nailed that as well. Now, what we did was we said, okay, I'm building the home 15 % less price. I'm just making up a number, okay. But what can I do to have more things in the same home that our competitors don't offer? For example, I was very surprised that in Miami, in Miami -Dade area, that

impact windows, hurricane impact window is an upgrade. You have to pay 15, 20 thousand dollars extra for that. Well, hurricane is going to come. So why don't we just have that as a standard standard in there? Okay. That's one. Number two is all the homes over here, single story, double story homes, one story is built with block work concrete, and then the next story is built with wood. Okay. So when, when hurricane come, half the home is going to be gone. Okay.

Grant (19:14.326)
Mm -hmm. A lot, yeah.

Grant (19:21.686)
Yeah

Grant (19:37.622)
The top goes.

Ash (19:39.73)
and the roof, the roofing system, again good, okay? And so we said, while we're saving that, why don't we also address the resilience part of the home, okay? In the sense that our resilient homes are at the same price as our competitor price, okay? Although we're saving it on how we build it, on the material cost, but we're giving all these free upgrades. And in fact, just to give a perspective,

We counted and there are like 80 plus upgrades that are compared as upsells to the consumer. Which is fine, they have a business model that works, okay? But it confuses the consumer in my opinion, okay? And so within ONIX, we just have three models, O, N, and X, okay? So consumer comes in, say I want an O model, N model, or X model, okay? So make it very simple, okay? X model has got everything, N model has got certain things, and

And guess what? We don't have any carpets in our home. Okay, because we believe that, you know, to have carpets in, especially in Florida is not right. Okay, because of humidity, because of, you know, kids, you know, the young kids get all the germs from all the carpets. Okay, so we have made sure that we are not, everything that we do, we provide a better envelope for our home, for saving energy. Okay, so.

So price is price, market dictates a price, okay? Because there's a land price, you buy land, you put up a home, and then you sell to the consumer, you compete in the marketplace, price is up and down depending on economy, the demand, so supply and demand creates what the price should be. But where can we impact, okay? We can impact, consumers are not well -educated usually when they're buying a home, of the expenses that they're gonna have once they buy the home, okay?

Grant (21:34.582)
Yep. Yep.

Ash (21:34.866)
For example, in the United States, the maintenance cost is one and a half to three times, 3 % of the total price of your home. Insurance. Insurance companies are leaving Florida, companies leaving California. My friend in California called me. He said, you need to be here because my insurance is just tripled in a year. And so that's two. Number three is energy bills, utilities.

Grant (21:46.006)
Yes.

Ash (22:03.122)
I mean those are all things that add up significantly. For example, I'll just give you an example. In the United States, average in Florida is about $3 ,500 insurance for your home. $3 ,500, okay? Our average insurance for the same size homes is about $1 ,200. So imagine how much saving that comes from insurance, okay?

Grant (22:21.526)
Wow. And is that because the windows are already installed for sort of hurricane protection?

Ash (22:25.362)
The way we build homes is all concrete, okay? Everything with a grip.

Grant (22:31.542)
Even the insurance companies know and understand that this house is sort of made.

Ash (22:36.913)
We are educating the insurance companies on a daily basis. Okay, so that's one. Maintenance. Our homes can last 100 plus years. Okay, you don't need any maintenance in our homes per se. Okay, and in the sense that they are solid, they're gonna stay there and hardly any maintenance costs. I mean, for example, we have a community over here that we have rented out. We thought that we'll build something and we rent it out and see how it goes, okay.

Grant (22:40.982)
Gotcha. Gotcha.

Ash (23:05.074)
And guess what? In those homes, because we see it ourselves, okay, because we are supposed to upgrade them on any maintenance or anything, that hardly any maintenance bills are coming in those homes, and they've been rented from last two years. I mean, I'm talking about 35, 40 homes that we built, okay, for renting it out, okay. So you save on that. And utilities, okay, so we have two initiatives in the company. One is how to envelop the home in a way that it's more that the air escape doesn't happen much, okay, which means, you know,

if it stays in the right way. We also have HVAC system that we are designing, which is going to change how HVACs are done in the world. Okay. Where each unit, each room is going to have a unit, okay, which is going to be part of your, part of your, part of your wall. Okay. And, and you know, and it won't make a noise. It will, it'll have all the artificial intelligence to figure out how, what is the humidity.

Grant (23:55.094)
Gotcha. Not a big ugly machine that needs to be hidden away.

Ash (24:05.234)
how many people are in the room, what are temperature people want, okay. You can have different temperature in different rooms because, you know, wife might want a different temperature, the kids might want a different temperature too. And number three is our homes don't make any noise. I mean, you go up and down, you can hardly tell if anybody's going up and down because it's not shaking, it's not wood, it's just solid, okay. So all of that adds up to cost savings for a home, okay. And I was just calculating the other day,

I said with the amount of people who save that cost and then let's say that they choose to pay that towards a mortgage. Instead of 30 year mortgage, you can actually pay off your entire home in 17 years if you have got all X -Worms. The savings that you get from all the stuff that you do. So anyway, those are the things that we look at on a daily basis and that's what drives us to be able to save operating costs for the consumer on a daily basis. So that's where we are focusing.

Grant (24:45.238)
Wow. Right.

Grant (25:01.398)
Yeah, I mean the, the efficiency cost upfront because of the automation in the factories building the home sort of there. The time to build is cut by. Geez. Almost a hundred times. And then you had the, and then you have the XS savings on the backend because the home is built the way it is and the efficiencies that it sort of provides. I guess I'm trying to find.

Ash (25:17.17)
Yes.

Grant (25:31.126)
the issue that cities and counties would have of bringing affordable, efficient, well -built sort of homes that can be developed very quickly. I'm not sure what, I guess, what are the hurdles there? I guess, what are they saying no to? Or is it just the acquisition of the land that is maybe the hardest part? And then once you have that, the government, that county or local

Ash (25:50.226)
Yeah. Yeah.

Grant (26:00.886)
entity is good with.

Ash (26:02.665)
No, it's just like I consider the land. I mean, just to give you a perspective, you can acquire land. Let's say if it's an agriculture zone, and to get it to permitting it to get for housing zone could take anything between three to four years. It's a long process. Okay. And so I personally think the government says we are marking these places. Okay. And this is where the government is going to provide

Grant (26:11.094)
Sure.

Grant (26:16.278)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Ash (26:30.354)
in a subsidized way the land, okay, and fast forward approvals, okay. I do believe that, like you brought up, there's three million shortage of housing in the United States, okay. And some of them are in the states where a lot of migration have happened in the last few years, okay. And I think those things have to be considered by the government to make sure that they have...

Grant (26:50.902)
Sure.

Ash (26:58.29)
looking at the land and looking at the places and adding people and adding efficiencies to get it done faster. Okay, because for me to build a home in less than 30 days and if I don't have a land, it doesn't matter because I can't build it anyway. Okay, so but the good news over here is we have been able to get land but those are already pre -approved. Somebody had already done all the work three, four years to get to that spot and now we're building it. You know, our competitors are taking eight, nine, twelve months to

Grant (27:22.23)
Gotcha.

Ash (27:28.05)
build the same thing and we're building it in less than 30 days. So that's off to the great start. But I do believe the governments can play a very big role. The government and private sector together can play a very big role. And technology can play a very big role, which we are proving that it is. Now, yeah, go ahead, please.

Grant (27:49.918)
Yeah, real quick on the, I wanted to dive into the materials a little bit. We talked about concrete being a big part of the home, but also there's, I was reading about sort of like hemp insulation or some type of efficiency. Cause again, all this stuff is, it still seems to be a hundred years old of sort of how we, we sort of built things like.

Ash (27:53.522)
Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah.

Ash (28:04.722)
Mm -hmm.

Grant (28:15.574)
when we were doing some stuff at our home was like, how is this not changed? We had like some foam stuff or something like that, that they, you know, told us is a little better than like the traditional insulation and all this stuff. And I'm just like, it all seems very outdated in a lot of different ways, but also causes so much waste. You know, I noticed there's just so many people in and out of the house and

Every person does one thing and it's like, it's overwhelming and it's incredibly, incredibly wasteful. But talk about the materials and talk about what the positivity that they yield from an efficiency perspective, but also they can capture a ton of carbon as well. There's a lot of sort of ancillary aspects to the decisions of the materials that you've used.

Ash (28:45.074)
Yes.

Ash (29:04.978)
Yeah, that's a great question. So first is, you know, in a traditional way in the US when the home gets built, it's got, it goes, the structure goes through seven layers of different things on top of it, okay? And people believe that the wood is sustainable, okay? But wood is only one piece, okay? And in fact, in some parts of the world, using cutting forest and using wood is supposed to be negative, okay? Because it's negative for the environment.

And especially in the countries where they have rapid deforestation and things. So I come from that background that you don't cut a tree, you actually grow a tree. So that's one piece. And especially in the United States and Canada, it's been categorized as sustainable product because you cut a forest and you put more trees and sustainable from that standpoint. But the seven layers go outside that.

Grant (29:46.422)
Yeah.

Ash (30:04.594)
thing, okay, the world. And that has nothing positive, okay, from environmental standpoint, as well as from sustainability standpoint, as also from the health standpoint, okay. I mean, half of time, 60, 70 % of the time is spent at home or maybe if not more, okay. And it's not a very healthy environment. I can tell you, I'm in the industry, I can tell you that, okay. Now,

Grant (30:06.902)
It deducts any positive environmental expectation. Yeah.

Ash (30:32.594)
But the way we do things is as following. We don't have those seven, eight layers because we don't need to. We are homes are built with, you know, we have proprietary mixes in our country that makes a less carbon footprint for the world. We have investment in the companies. By the way, I was invited by McKinsey to one of their housing

based, you know, it was more of a show and tell of labs and things and what's happening and it was in San Francisco. And I was completely surprised that 300 companies working on how to take the carbon out of the concrete completely. Okay. And, you know, the government has said by 2040 or 2050 or whatever the timeframe is, I think it's going to happen much faster. Okay. Because every good brain is working towards that to make it happen. Okay. From our standpoint, we have investment in few of those companies. Okay.

Grant (31:28.63)
Yep.

Ash (31:31.538)
And one of them is very, very clever. They're using a bio way of building a country. And we can build tiles with them right now, and hopefully we can build structures as a progress.

Grant (31:44.438)
And so you said you mentioned Onyx is itself an investor in some of these material companies. Super smart. Yeah.

Ash (31:50.546)
Yes, yes we are. Okay. And normally, we have our proprietary stuff as well that we keep experimenting and doing, but at the same time, we are investor in others as well. The second piece is, the second, one of the piece on this one is we have, you know, we talked about, you talked about, you know, the envelope of the home, which is, you know, we brought up then when you were.

opening of the home and you found a lot of forms and things and all of that stuff. By the way, that's not very healthy, by the way, just to just for your perspective. But now the installation that is coming up is a lot of hemp, a lot of people are experimenting with different kinds of insulation. Hemp based insulation happens to be one of them, which we are an investor as well in the company and we use, we have a plan to start using that in our portfolio as we go forward as the company makes progress.

Grant (32:24.694)
Yeah, it was horrible.

Ash (32:46.482)
There's a lot of natural things that are happening that can be used in a home, which are not harmful for the health. And we as a company are working towards it ourselves. At the same time, we're investing in some of these early startups and startup companies which has got a potential to be able to change and get us there as well. And on the other material, there's a building material.

structure. Okay, so like I said in structure building a structure there's a lot of wastage so we we don't waste any material in a factory environment. We're using recyclable steel okay which is you know. McKenzie did a study on us and we and they said we are saving about our homes to our equivalent homes for our competitors is close to about 15 % less carbon footprint right now and they're saying with our HVAC system and other things coming in play.

will be 40 % better over here very soon in the next three to five years. So that's what we are heading towards. But that, you know, one of the questions that got asked to me in one of the interviews was, what do I think about how the world is going to look like, how is it going to look like at the age of 20, 50? And there were other people in that and they said, well, we'll be carbon free, we'll be energy free by that time, energy neutral and things.

And I said, that's going to happen faster. That's not only 2050. That's the next 10 years or 15 years maximum. It's going to happen because everything is moving so fast. Because I keep a tab on technology as an interest. And at the same time, I'm seeing what's happening in some of the material science pieces of it, which is going to take us over there. So that is moving very, very fast. I can tell you that. And I think the companies like Onyx and Onyx

Grant (34:20.342)
Wow. Wow.

Ash (34:43.57)
light companies are going to get there faster than some of the traditional players just because, you know, why change something that is working and from their perspective. So anyway, I hope that answered your question.

Grant (34:54.198)
You mean? Yeah, no, I mean, so you mentioned, let's say it's moving very fast on the material front and you expect you're very optimistic and you see a lot of positive, positive founders and smart people sort of working on, you know, building homes more efficiently, you know, environmentally friendly, energy friendly and more efficient. And that cost comes, comes down as, as an incredible burden on

consumers and homeowners and cutting that in half, let's say, will be huge for sort of affordability. But just like in any industry, let's say, startups are always gonna move faster than the government and regulation and all these other things. And it seems like we're gonna move, like we said, maybe starting off, it seems like we have the talent, we have the materials, we have everything.

from a technology standpoint to build as many homes as we need. And we can build sort of this really efficient, friendly home, affordable home. Are you as optimistic that in that 10 years, 15 years, it will sort of build the amount of homes that need to be sort of built to sort of allow those first time homeowners to get a beautiful home, like they can raise their family? And are you as optimistic as...

that the counties and the legislature will allow these innovations to actually be built at that speed that they're being developed in.

Ash (36:29.778)
Yeah, so look, this question has three pronged answer from my perspective. One is, if you, so there are not too many home builders are coming in play, but there are material sciences in the home building industry that is playing a good part to get to that spot, okay. But the problem with the people who have got technology and building homes right now, like for example, there are people building homes with 3D, people building homes with.

Grant (36:59.158)
Yep.

Ash (36:59.346)
you know, other things and the cost has not been addressed completely by technology. Okay, so when a new technology comes in, it's usually more expensive than rest of it and with interest rate regime and things, the consumer is price sensitive and goes to buy the regular home because that's all they can afford at the prices. Okay, but technology has to bring the prices down eventually.

Grant (37:12.982)
Mm -hmm.

Ash (37:29.042)
Okay, because if technology, so that's the reason a lot of technology companies in homes, in construction field have not done well or gone under because they were not able to get the technology to match the pricing for what the consumer wants. Okay. So that's one piece that, that's a, you know, the technology can be anything, but the technology, if it doesn't address the cost, it's not going to be useful end of the day. Okay. You know.

when we started the company that was the first thing that I laid out or we laid out that whatever we do in technology it has been cost efficient and cost effective. Okay. So happy to say that, you know, like I said, some of the other technology companies have not even built 100 homes. They've been in business for the last seven, eight years and here we are in three years. 600 homes built. This year alone we're going to build about four or five hundred homes. Next year we're running towards 1200 homes. So off to the races. Okay. So that's

That's why when I say ONIX and ONIX -like companies are going to be successful is because technology has to address the cost as well. That's a lot of people miss that. Second of all, manufacturing people think is easy. Manufacturing is not easy. Okay. It takes a discipline. It takes a lot of effort and things and a lot of automation to do it right. Okay. So that's another piece of it. Okay.

Grant (38:40.246)
You

Ash (38:55.794)
What I'm actually very optimistic about is, you know, another thing that triggered all of this stuff is with COVID. Okay, when COVID happened, people changed a little bit. People lifestyle changed. They wanted an extra space as a home office. People want more space around the home so that they can go outside their homes. Okay. You know, it created and also another thing that happened, okay, which by the way, we are on the cusp of that in the right way.

Grant (39:05.558)
Mm -hmm.

Ash (39:23.986)
the taste of the consumer is changing. I mean, I've seen in, for example, I have a home in California and any time in my neighborhood, a home comes up or somebody takes the home down and builds a new home, it's a very modern looking home, okay? In the sense that it's got high ceiling, it's got windows coming down, okay?

that the consumer taste is changing, okay, and changing very rapidly, okay, which is actually very good for what we do, okay, because building those homes in our factory is much easier than building traditional homes, okay. Modern homes are much easier for us to build, okay. So that's another thing that is happening, okay, and we are careful because sometimes we don't build traditional homes, we build other transitional homes or modern homes, okay, that's what you can see in our design, okay.

So the consumer taste is changing, consumer desire is changing. That's gonna push the industry to get to what you said that you go to neighborhoods, everything looks the same, okay? It will change over a period of time because the more more looks are coming, okay? Number three is I'm optimistic, okay, that any industry, okay, has to change over a period of time, okay? And I do believe the home, American dream is

People, I keep reading about, everybody keeps talking about American dream is it going to be dead? No, okay. American dream is here, okay, to live. Okay. I can, I promise you that. Okay. I'm a, I'm a 30 year old son who just bought his first home. I've never seen him so happy. The reason he's so happy is because he feels that he has a home. Okay. That, you know, that he doesn't have to depend to somebody else.

Grant (40:59.894)
you

Grant (41:05.366)
amazing.

Grant (41:10.358)
Is there is is onyx home building the American dream? Is that is that taken? Okay, can you use that? Is that that might be taken? Check the copyright on that.

Ash (41:17.554)
I don't know. That's a good one. I would want to check with the marketing guys. Okay. Yes, exactly. But you know, the pieces that are two pieces that are missing has been missing. That's what we have tried to address is one is homes and building homes. That's one side. The consumer experience around buying a home is really, really bad.

Grant (41:23.482)
Hehehehe

Grant (41:42.678)
Mm -hmm. It's a big one. Yeah.

Ash (41:47.73)
Okay, it's awesome. Okay, it is the biggest spend any consumer is doing in their lifetime. Okay. And that experience has to be in my opinion, taken to a different level and higher level. Okay. So think about this as I always say this, but it's been used a lot. Okay. When we start the company, we say, well, if we succeed in technology and be Tesla like, we'll be successful.

Grant (41:48.31)
Yep, it's awful. Yes.

Grant (42:02.486)
Mmm.

Ash (42:17.042)
exceed in consumer experience and be Apple -like will be successful. Okay, so it's just trying to take from from on its standpoint, we try to take both the sides in a way. It's still some some time away from from reaching that goal, but that's what is driving us every day. Okay, not only building good homes, but at the same time giving our consumers better experience than our competitors.

Grant (42:40.15)
I'll end on the last question here. And it's a little bit about the future. And I know this industry specifically is really dynamic and changing every year. But what are some of the goals and successes you and the company would like to achieve maybe in the next five to 10 years? You had mentioned sort of amount of homes being built. Is that sort of the KPI that you look at every year as a success rate? Or I guess what are some of the things that you're going to look at next five to 10 years?

Ash (43:09.938)
Yeah, that's a great question. So, I mean, we always look at five years. I mean, it's always a changing plan of next five years, but we do have a time horizon of looking at five years. You know, in the United States, about a million homes are built and sold every year. New homes, okay. Or eight million homes transact every year, but about 800 ,000 to a million homes are built and sold, new homes every year. Okay. And, you know, the biggest guy in this industry probably makes about maybe about 80 ,000 homes out of those a year. Okay.

Grant (43:27.862)
Hmm.

Ash (43:39.826)
And here we are, we just started, next five year, we expect to do about 10 to 15 ,000 homes a year, okay. We have a trajectory towards that, we want to be nationwide. At least we have identified, we are actually in our full game plan, we are starting in Texas, okay. Florida is, South Florida is done, we're starting in Texas.

Grant (43:49.75)
Wow.

Ash (44:08.338)
So next year is about Texas. Once that is done, we plan to take it to other destination, California, Arizona, you know, you name it, okay. And Nevada, okay. And again, climate change is affecting everyone. Okay, let's be very clear. California's got earthquakes, you know, fires, okay. The hurricanes, tornadoes in middle, and guess what? In Texas, hailstroms now.

I mean, I have a friend of mine, he has changed his roof twice in last one year alone because of the hailstorm situation. Okay. And that's another thing to be addressing. Okay. And so where I'm heading towards this is our goal is to keep doing things that makes home more resilient and take the operating cost out of the home for the consumer on as

Grant (44:38.134)
Hmm

Ash (45:03.314)
on a daily basis as on what we do. At the same time, we build in speed and be able to be go nationwide over the next five years. We might not be in every state, but all the states that count, we expect us to be there. And by the way, it requires people and teams. I'm building that as we speak.

Grant (45:25.686)
Yeah

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Ash. This was, this was really great. Very informative. I love talking to, to people in, in industries that are really hard to disrupt. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a very long -term, trajectory and it's, it's a long -term path. And, you know, you dedicate, you and the team dedicate a lot of time, energy, and, you know, a lot of your, your life to, to, to this chapter, right. And doing this. So.

Thanks for taking the time. I know you're busy, but best of luck for you and the team for the next decade.

Ash (46:00.21)
Thanks, thanks, Grant, really appreciate it. And I need all your good wishes from you and from your listeners and blessings to be successful in ONNX journey. Thank you.

Meet Onx Homes, the Startup Building Sustainable Houses in 30 Days

In episode 213 of the Disruptors for Good podcast, I speak with Ash Bhardwaj, President and CEO, of Onx Homes, disrupting the homebuilding industry in a sustainable way.

Enjoying this? Get the next one in your inbox.

Meet Onx Homes, the Startup Building Sustainable Houses in 30 Days

In episode 213 of the Disruptors for Good podcast, I speak with Ash Bhardwaj, President and CEO, of Onx Homes, disrupting the homebuilding industry in a sustainable way.

A New Era of Homebuilding with Onx Homes

The Vision and Journey of Ash Bhardwaj

Addressing the Housing Crisis Sustainably

A Sustainable Future

Key Takeaways from Interview

Full transcript of the episode

Enjoying this? Get the next one in your inbox.