As Utah continues its quest for more housing, an innovative approach to get projects built faster — and cheaper — is catching on in other parts of the country: factory-based prefabrication.
“There's no reason why it should take 12 to 18 months to build a lot of buildings when physically they can actually be done in half the time or lower,” said Reframe Systems CEO Vikas Enti.
Reframe Systems uses small-scale factories and automation to build housing that can be rapidly put together like building blocks at the build site. The company already has operations in Massachusetts and Southern California and sees Utah as a potential next step.
Enti said they are still negotiating with prospective partners in the state, and consider their approach to housing construction as a step forward for the industry.
“We made a bet that factory-built housing is a path where we get greater predictability because you're moving most work into a controlled environment," he said. “But also a path where we get a lot more leverage from technology.”
Reframe was a 2025 Ivory Prize winner in the construction and design category at a Utah housing summit in October.
A mix of predictability and automation, Enti said, could mean huge savings for developers looking to get projects move-in ready as fast as possible.
“We see a path for driving down the cost of housing production by 30% to 50% over time,” he said. “Labor is where we're actually driving the needle the most.”
According to the Associated General Contractors of America, a staggering 92% of construction firms report difficulty finding enough workers for their projects.
And because of the pre-planned nature of a factory manufacturing process, there’s less waste – another variable Enti said will help drive down costs.
But there’s a catch: zoning rules that determine where housing gets built and what it looks like vary from city to city. That can make prefabrication at scale a tough sell in a state like Utah. Those regulations — and how to streamline them — are something Steve Waldrip, who serves as Gov. Spencer Cox’s Senior Housing Advisor, has thought a lot about.
“We built in all of these artificial barriers with zoning and planning and other things that elongate that process to get to where you're actually putting a shovel in the dirt,” he said on a Nov. 28 episode of PBS Utah’s The Hinckley Report. “We haven't created any value.”
Utah isn’t the only state dealing with this web of housing regulations. Enti said when launching their Massachusetts operation, navigating complex zoning in New England towns was a challenge.
“Towns get to dictate the type of siding, they get to dictate the type of fenestration and roof slope lines,” he said. “So anytime you have a product, and you go to a new town, you'll have to make changes to comply with it, sometimes within the same town.”
Simply put, the larger the area and the more uniform the building regulations are, the faster the building process moves.
For policy officials like Waldrip, who has a professional background in real estate, and builders like Enti, less time spent approving projects and getting them built means more money stays in the pockets of buyers and tenants.
“We're creating all of this economic waste in our housing system that isn't producing better houses,” Waldrip said on The Hinckley Report. “It's not producing better neighborhoods. It's not producing anything. It is simply wasting money raising prices and it falls onto the consumer at the end of the day.”
On the labor side, Enti said he has faced pushback from some who believe moving a large portion of construction to a factory will put tradespeople like carpenters out of a job. For him, he’s not trying to replace tradespeople; he’s changing the nature of their work.
“There is a clear tension in the industry where it's hard to find enough trades to get all the jobs done,” said Enti. “What we believe industrialization allows for is it really allows you to transform a lot of the trades into tasks that you very quickly allow a new student of the trades to actually come up to speed.”
As Utah faces big growth projections for the next 40 years, Gov. Cox has said statewide zoning reform is on the table in the push for more housing. The state has already stepped in and legislated things, such as housing near transit hubs, and there are hints that more changes could be on the horizon, like preempting local zoning regulations.
“I don't want to go the preemption route,” Cox told reporters at the October Ivory Innovations housing summit. “But I would be lying if I said it wasn't on the table.”
