Modular home company hopes to add affordable housing statewide
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIn Indiana and across the nation, communities are seeking ways to address a shortage of affordable housing.
The housing affordability gap for Indiana’s minimum wage workers grew from 2023 to 2024, according to the latest “Out of Reach” report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Indianapolis-based Volumod builds both multifamily and single-family modular homes, and it hopes to become part of the solution.
“Think of modular housing like a car factory. If you want a car, you’re not going to have all the parts delivered to your front yard and assembled there,” Volumod CEO Ethan Fernhaber said. “Everything’s done in a climate-controlled factory environment…it really allows us to build the product while the foundation is being set out on site. This greatly accelerates the time it takes to create that new development.”
Fernhaber tells Inside INdiana Business that there is a housing crisis. Volumod, which was founded in 2020, can produce five homes per day.
There are nearly 5,000 of its units in communities statewide, including South Bend, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis and Evansville. Some of the developments include public-private partnerships. Volumod expects to have 100 employees by the end of the year.
“We’ve built our first four communities, or our own modular developments,” Fernhaber said. “We believe that 2025 will be our best year yet, and we’re excited to do not only our own internal orders, but also third party orders for other developers and significant nonprofits here in our state as well.”
Volumod’s goal is to produce 80% of its products for multi-family buyers and 20% for single-family buyers. It also hopes to open two more factories in the future.