Thinking About the Box –
Ready to Inspect The Return of Leftovers?

They’re not really zombies, though you could say they are “the living dead.”

They’re leftovers.

These things don’t fall into neat boxes, with prescribed standards. Talk about a job that calls on the best in “professional opinion.” We’re talking leftovers.

And if there’s any category in inspecting that has seen exceptional growth, leftovers would have to be high on the list.

In commercial, first it was leftover gas stations. Now it’s leftover churches.

In residential, from 2010 to 2014 it used to be leftover spec homes, along with their kissing cousins, foreclosures.

Today, it’s container homes.  You read that right.

We’re talking leftover steel shipping containers – the 8×20 boxes loaded on supersized ships to carry wads of goods over the oceans, between continents and nations. You can dress ‘em up…and maybe you can sell ‘em out. So whaddaya do with leftover containers?

Build homes, turns out to be one answer.

Kentucky is set to get its container home development now. We had one or two container single family homes built, starting about two years ago. High wattage West Point, KY home inspector Gary Brewer brought them up back then, calling PLI for tips on inspecting the new-fangled houses. Since then, PLI classes have included them in “off code” housing that’s touched on in Structure classes and classes on standards.

A whole development of container homes was bound to come.

Now it has. But it won’t happen overnight.

A proposed shipping container community in Louisville, near Germantown Mill Lofts, “could be the tipping point for the trend to take root,” according to Louisville real estate broker Grant Hill in a Business First interview (8/19/2016).

The container community will have around eight homes, built out of two married 8×20 containers fr the first floor, andd two more for the second floor. That would be roughly a 640 sq. ft. home.

Then each home gets a rooftop deck.

The developers say they expect to get their building permits in the next few weeks. They expect construction to be finished in about four months.
They also mentioned they had heard lots from other developers interested in doing their own container homes. “This is just the first spot we’ve been involved in,” said Hill. “But it won’t be the last.”

Louisville Metro Government wants to fire this up with new, standardized procedures for container homes and sees the project as a new way to help deliver affordable housing, commented developer Rick Kuber, who also is CEO of Sun Tan City.

PLI will keep you posted as those standards emerge.

For more sketches of the shipping container development, go to: http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/news/2016/08/15/shipping-container-homes-a-new-animal-for.html