The Factory Making Homes Faster Than Ever Before

Okay, there's a lot going on. Looks good, man.

Yeah, last time I was here, this tree wasn't even there.

This house comes with a story. It's the very first one to be constructed from the ground up since the Pacific Palisades fires hit Los Angeles in 2025. It's modern and bright, and there's a nice woman named Sue who lives inside of it. Hi.

This is Ashlee.

I'm Ashlee. How are you? This house went up faster than any other because much of it was prebuilt in a factory by a startup called Cover. And Cover has the ridiculous idea that it can take on the great and powerful bureaucracy of California and build lots of nice homes. Quicker than ever before. To dream so big is to commit a thought crime in a state so rich in regulation, graft, and Gavin Newsom's smirk. But here we are amid the ruins of the fires, and there is an actual new house, and I wanted to find out how such a thing could be allowed to happen. So this is the factory. Yeah. Which part of town are we in again?

We're in Gardena right now. Gardena.

And then we're not too far from SpaceX and Hawthorne and all that.

Yeah, we're about 10 minutes from SpaceX, 15 minutes from LAX.

We'll get back to the Palisades in a minute, but first we're going to start here at Cover's headquarters and factory. Our host is Alexis Rivas, Cover's co-founder and CEO. He's a Canadian by birth and an architect by education. This used to be like an aerospace factory?

Yeah, like heavy machining. So helicopter doors. They actually had a 70-foot-long CNC machine.

Everyone forgets this about LA, man. People make stuff here.

Oh yeah, next door we've got a CNC shop.

Yeah.

We've got some anodization down the street.

Okay. Alexis's pitch is that we should build homes like we build cars, on an assembly line with parts that all fit together. And we should do this with a modern twist, which is using software to help with the home design and the hellscape that is the California permitting process. This is a one-bedroom?

This one's a one-bedroom, yeah. It's just the show space. We also do testing in here.

And you guys do everything, even like the kitchens and—

Everything.

Covert Homes are not really meant to be cheap. They're made of steel instead of wood and have no drywall. You're limited to a certain set of finishings, but those finishings are high-end. How long would it take in the idealized world to make this?

We did build this exact same one in LA. We got permits for it in a month, took 45 days to build, including the foundations, including like hooking up the sewer line and all that.

Yeah.

And one of the cool things, actually, you can kind of see it. We make ceilings that just kind of click in.

Yeah.

You run the electrical, the plumbing through there, and you can easily service it. As opposed to everything being shoved in the wall and screwed in and spackled and painted. And then if something ruins or you just want to add new wiring, you've got to rip a hole. I mean, that's construction.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of insane.

It's nice, man. Super modern. We've been prefabbing homes for a long time, and it turns out that they don't appeal to that many people. And there are several disaster stories about startups that have tried new takes on prefabbing and on modernizing home building. As in, this is a genuinely terrible business to try and get into for myriad reasons. Alexis, though, is a sadist, apparently. He's convinced that these companies went about their prefabbing all wrong. They either got too big, too fast, or they focus too much on trying to build entire homes.

I looked at other companies that had tried to build homes in a factory. A lot of them had a set of pre-designed models and you pick one of, you know, 5 or 10 or whatever it is, and it just doesn't work well for that property or that person's preferences. Well, the thing that you need to scale is not like the whole home as a single layout. It's the panels, the Lego blocks. Then how many of those you put together doesn't really matter.

Yeah, yeah. When you lay all this stuff out, how many options do the people have on how they want to arrange different things?

It's practically infinite. You can do a courtyard, you can do an L-shape, you can do an S-shape, U-shape. Okay. All 90-degree angles.

Yeah.

Right? But any kind of layout. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is that the roof?

These are floor panels.

Floor panels?

Yep.

Okay.

So we offer wood and vinyl floors.

Okay.

It's an entirely steel structure. And from a seismic performance standpoint, from a fire standpoint, and then also from a manufacturability standpoint, like steel is just great to work with.

So you're getting this sturdier house.

You're getting a better house.

Yeah, yeah.

Termites aren't going to eat it.

What are those?

Those are our roof panels.

Roof panels. Okay. This has the plumbing in there.

This one has the plumbing in it.

Okay. Fenestrations, windows.

This is the fenestrations, yes. So windows and doors. They're aluminum, right? So that's the kind of thing you see in higher-end homes, aluminum windows and doors.

Okay.

So this is the kind of thing that, you know, on site you'd have to get on a ladder to do this. You're talking about, you know, something that's like 10 feet up. Here it's on a table at a more ergonomic level. And as we go faster in building, more, we can invest in tooling to make 10 times as many homes on the production line.

Right.

You'll see there's like not a lot of automation in the factory. We're still very much at the iteration stage and scaling that iteration before like investing in heavy automation.

So there's some future where you could have 100 of these laid out and something's cocking them all. Yeah.

With V1, we delivered a few dozen homes. Out of this space, we're going to get to hundreds and then go to a much bigger factory. Heavier investment, heavier automation. And that's when you get to thousands of homes.

To see an actual Cover home in the wild— Go to the Palisades.

Let's go to the Palisades.

We hopped in Alexis's Tesla, of course, and headed for the Palisades. Have you been out to the Palisades a bunch?

Oh yeah.

We tend to be really modern, really high-end, and that's what a lot of the Palisades was. So we're in a position to help.

How did you get into all this in the first place?

I knew from a very young age that I wanted to build homes. I just like loved construction, loved design, loved engineering, loved architecture. For Christmas or for my birthday, I'd always ask for architecture books. Started learning about it early. Like, I helped some family friends design their home when I was 14, and they ended up, you know, building that set of plans. And then I helped my grandparents build their home around the same age.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And I saw from their perspective how painful it was. The idea of COVID was like a multi-year journey of like learning what's wrong with the conventional construction industry. And then the solution kind of became more obvious. Right.

Are we— is this like— I've never actually been to the Palisades.

Yeah, this is the Palisades.

Great.

Yeah, I see these signs.

They let us burn. Yeah.

Oh my God. Yeah, there's houses going up everywhere.

There's homes going up now.

Yeah.

To see the Palisades in person is shocking. We were visiting about a year after the fires had ripped through this area. Some houses were left standing but still had cosmetic and smoke damage. A few houses had also been repaired. No one except for Cover, though, had managed to do a complete rebuild. Gavin Newsom naturally found a way to take credit for the feat. The real star of the show here, though, is Sue. She's a longtime Palisades resident who was kind enough to let us into her home for a peek. She's got this home plus an ADU for a combined 6 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms across 3,000 square feet.

I'll talk about the fires because I was here.

Yeah.

One of my daughters lives up in Palisades Highlands. Which is up higher, practically where the fire started. She came down here because no fire had ever reached this far down. We were here for maybe 45 minutes and then my daughter said, "Mom, we've got to get out of here." And we went to a friend's house in Venice. We had no idea what had happened until I got a call from my alarm company who said that the smoke detector went off. And they said, "Should we call the fire department?" And I said, I don't think so.

Yeah, you knew what had happened.

I knew what had happened. Yeah. It's surreal.

Yeah.

And now the houses are getting framed pretty quickly here, especially in this area, which is nice.

Yeah. And you lived in the Palisades for about 40 years?

Yeah, 40 years in this house.

Yeah.

The sad thing is that it's all the memories. But we went to Cover because Cover had been recommended to us by a very dear friend of mine, and the And the rest is history. It's very comfortable.

I'm very happy. I'm not a housing or design expert, but there are some obvious things about the COVID Homes. They're very bright. They feel clean and contemporary. They also feel sturdier than many homes in California, which often seem like they're made out of plywood and cardboard.

This is the—

Bedroom.

First bedroom. You're lying down in bed. And you've got an unobstructed ocean view. This is kind of like your appliance counter. Put your coffee machine, your toaster, close it up.

So you pick one kind of toilet?

You can get the bidet one.

I have two options for my toilet.

Two options.

There is also a clinical vibe to the homes. They're Scandinavian in the sense that I kept expecting someone to pop out and make me a meal out of braised kelp. But this also seems to be what lots of people want these days. I feel bad invading Sue's spot. What's she reading? This home took about a year to build, which is a far cry from Cover's 1-month pitch. That said, a lot of that had to do with permits and the unusual nature of the site. Will this whole place be filled with COVID homes soon? Will I buy a Cover home? I mean, maybe. But Alexis must go first. You live in a Coverhome?

I have lived in a Coverhome and I'm looking forward to living in a Coverhome again soon.

Okay, what's stopping you now? You got to find a spot?

They're not cheap.

Yeah.

They're not cheap.

Because you kind of have to be in one, man, right?

Yeah, I've got to be in one. I've got to be in one. We've got a pretty significant backlog. I don't want to cut in front of the line.

Yeah.