Aro Homes this month completed and sold its first hyper-efficient house made in a factory in Sacramento.
The Mountain View-based company sold the home in Mountain View for $4.2 million, said co-CEO Carl Gish.
The company’s second home is being assembled on-site in Mountain View, and a third home destined for San Jose is being constructed now in the Sacramento factory, Gish said.
Aro Homes is pioneering a construction strategy whereby most of the home and its engineered systems are built in a controlled factory setting. Construction is then completed at the home site.
The company, a 2021 startup, has 25 of its 40 full-time employees at its factory in Sacramento.
Aro builds ultra-efficient homes inside a factory setting, which reduces waste by 40%, the company says. The factory setting also allows for more precision in construction and avoids weather delays. The homes have consistent design and engineering for systems like heating, cooling, water and plumbing. They come outfitted with solar photovoltaic and battery systems.
Aro can build a house in about 90 days. By comparison, it can take about 19 months to build a home on-site.
The company is on track to install its first three homes in about four months. Eventually, the company will be able to deliver 75 to 80 homes per year from the Sacramento factory, he said. The company also will eventually add more factories to deliver homes to less expensive cities.
The company’s strategy now is to deliver the homes in areas where housing prices are high, which gives the company some margin while it ramps up and refines its processes.
The design Aro delivered in Mountain View is a 3,000-square-foot single-family home with four bedrooms and an office space.
Aro Homes are designed by Seattle-based architecture firm Olson Kundig.
“We wanted to partner with someone with exceptional design," Gish said, adding that Olson Kundig is also known for its strength in environmentally oriented work, both in residential and commercial designs.
“Aro Homes has a great mission that touches both high quality, human-centered design and super-efficient, streamlined delivery, and we could not be happier to partner with them on the design of their first homes,” said Tom Kundig, founder of Olson Kundig, in a news release. "From affordability and expanded access for homebuyers to the speed of the construction, this is an exciting project on every level."
The Aro home features a high-performing building envelope coupled with high-efficiency heating, air conditioning and lighting systems engineered to use 67% less energy than the American Institute of Architects 2030 Challenge Baseline for energy performance. The homes are oriented to maximize sunlight for the roof-mounted photovoltaic solar array, which will produce more electricity than the house uses in a year. The design is so efficient that it offsets its initial embodied carbon to build the home within 16 years, Gish said.
“Nobody is building what we are building,” he said.
The homes have an option for gray water reclamation and reuse, which further reduces water use by as much as 45%.
Aro Homes raised $21 million in November 2022, in a funding round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's venture capital firm, Innovation Endeavors. Portola-based Western Technology Investment and Stanford University also participated in the funding round.
