Speed and Precision: How to Build a Custom Home More Efficiently

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, thelandgeek.com and on this week's Roundtable podcast, we have almost all the usual suspects, but we're lucky because we have a special guest. Our guest today is Garrett Moore, CEO and founder of agores.com and so Garrett's a big deal. I'll just put on my anchorman voice. After achieving a degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford, and despite an early desire to jump right into a Silicon Valley startup after graduation, Garrett's passion to serve led him to San Diego to become an officer in the Navy SEALs. During this time, he was also selected to become an Olmsted Scholar, similar to a Rhodes Scholar. After learning Hebrew from scratch, he earned his master's degree in cybersecurity at Tel Aviv University in Hebrew. Living there in Startup Nation, he learned another critical lesson. Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. Garrett Moore, welcome.

Thanks so much for having me.

So we're going to go around and ask some questions, but I always like to take the first question. And so I just want to rewind the tape. Garrett, and how did you go from, you know, this, you know, this engineering background, and then skip Silicon Valley, serve your country, and then think, you know what, we got a housing crisis I got to take care of. I'll take that.

So the path is a circuitous one. Definitely not one I would have ever expected, but it was the right one and it's been a wild ride. So that's the kind of the pieces that connect all these dots together is I grew up in Arizona, kind of a middle class family, love sports, pretty good student, got a chance to keep doing both at Stanford. And then you get there and very quickly you realize one of these is not like the other. I'm the imposter here. Not smart enough and not athletic enough to hang. And so you realize as a young man, okay, yeah, I can't keep playing sports indefinitely, but I love that team camaraderie. And so as I was looking at that, again, the mind of a 20 year old, I was like, oh, the military sports for adults, Let me try that. And I'm being a little flippant, but it honestly was not ever on the path. No military in the family. But the idea for me in that naivety was I really want to do something that matters. I want to be a part of a team that matters. So what does that look like? So you start to research the military and you Unpack it a little bit. You're like, well, if I'm going to in for a penny, in for a pound, let's see what Special Operations has to offer. You start to unpack that a little bit further. The more I met seals, the more I fell in love with that camaraderie and that brotherhood and said, that's the kind of young man I want to become. Don't know if I can hack it, don't know if I'll ever get accepted or be able to make it, but that is worth pursuing. And so from there, ended up getting selected and then kind of fast forward through the next 12 years. Three deployments, a tremendous amount of personal growth as a young man, young leader, young husband, young father. It was just a wild ride, and it was awesome. But third kid deep. My wife and I want to buy a house. We go to buy a house, end up having to tear it down, stumble into construction, become an accidental developer, and go, what just happened? Like, hang on a sec. I know I've been, like, off the grid for the last 12 years, but how can we fix this problem as a society? Why is it still this bad? And so I went through seven general contractors before finally I was like, no, no. I have an expectation of the level of professionalism I want. I want this job site running like a special operations platoon or troo. I'm going to do it myself. And of course, it's not that easy. And, you know, you got to track down electricians on a Tuesday afternoon and all the drama that most people have with construction. But in so doing, I got my hands dirty and I developed a. A passion. I guess the way I describe it is I'm in love with this industry, but I'm not in love with its weights. And so that's what really allowed me to make a transition and say, you know what? This is now worth leaving the military for. This is a big problem, a very human problem. It's not a California problem. I mean, this is now a plague across the US Let me see if I can bring some of the lessons I've aggregated along this bumpy road and see if I can. I can move the needle in this problem.

I love it. I love it. I'm going to hand the baton off. And he loves going first, by the way, and asking these questions to the Zen master. Breathe in the mailing, breathe out the marketing. Mike, what's your question for Garrett?

Garrett, thanks for coming today. Appreciate it. My pleasure. So I'm looking at some of the things you've done. Is this legit? It says build a 2500 square foot custom home in less than five days. Did I misread that? Is that, is that because my question would build off of that.

Are there two zeros missing?

No. So, so let me give you a kind of a little bit of a snapshot of where we are, where the industry should be. So most people, when they think of construction, probably 9 months, 12 months depends as you get into a custom, custom urban infill market. And it's going to go north of that. The reality is I'm going to go back to the future here for a sec. So the predecessor to nvr, which is a national public builder, was a company called Ryan Homes. Ryan homes. In the 1970s, no technology was building homes consistently. 14 days permits to keys. Now, that business ended up running into some issues because they bought the Pittsburgh Pirates and lost focus, but they absolutely dominated. In fact, it's actually a case study at Stanford Business School right now. And we've kind of, we've kind of taken for granted or lost our appetite to hold construction to a standard. And so now it's, it's damn near heresy to think that you could be building homes in days and not months. But we've done it before as a society. So I use that as a backdrop to say this is not that crazy. Now, as a caveat, there is a certain amount of the five days that kind of depends on what's going on. But the idea behind the business is that when you do construction in a factory and it shows up to the job site ready to go, it should be assembly, not actually construction itself. And so as an example, the five days for right now, we've done a custom home in five days here in Southern California. It wasn't soup to nuts. And so as the technology progresses, that installation is going to stay the same. You're just putting more and more into the product off site. Ultimately, our vision as a business is that we would be the largest builder in the country by the end of the decade. And that in that time, anywhere we build, we would consistently be 30 days from permits in hand to keys in hand. Well, all right. Well, still 30 day. So this is the question that productivity, efficiency, it doesn't matter if you're building homes, selling land. Like, what are some key tips for us? So there's the high tech tips and the low tech tips. I'll start with the low tech. Low tech is just good communications. And this is where I think one of the spillover lessons from, from the Navy seals kind of came in is a recognition that if you do not have everybody in the same room with everybody's interests and equities involved, that can kind of think like a team. It's the old adage, you're going to end up with a camel. A camel is a horse designed by committee. And that's generally how construction works. Right now you got 35, 40 different subcontractors all looking out for their own individual slice. So when we look at efficiencies, the easiest low hanging fruit is just better communication then working up the chain from there. A lot of this gets around automation and digitization. So in a traditional build cycle, the architect is not in communication with the structural engineer, which is not in communication with the framework. And so literally you have the kindergarten telephone game. One person makes a digital file, prints it on paper in a PDF. That next person digitize it and then reprints it back down into a PDF. And then some poor guy is leading a crew of four or five guys at the job site going, these don't match. I got to build a real house. The inspector is going to bust my chops if it's off. And so it's great digitizing the heartbeat of a home and making sure that there is a single source of truth on how the home should be built rather than, yeah, best guess, here's what we think, go figure it out at the job site. That's really helpful. I like that. Single source of truth. That's a, that's a powerful statement. Thank you very much, Garrett. My pleasure.

So Garrett, I'm going to hand you off to the, I think the one person on the roundtable that actually can really build stuff. That's Eric Peterson, our technician.

All right, well, Garrett, good to meet you. Thank you for your service.

My pleasure.

I don't know, I mean, I think the idea is the business itself is super intriguing. Like who's ever heard of building a house in five days? So I mean, that's super cool.

2500 square foot home. We're not talking about a tiny home.

Right, right.

So, so the first thing that comes to mind is like, why isn't everybody doing this? But I think my, my question really revolves around automation and systems. So obviously to, to accomplish this there's, there's automations, there's systems in place. Tell me a story about, you know, maybe a particular issue that came up as you were developing this strategy that you were able to solve with either a certain type of automation or certain system that you put in place and how that improved the overall process.

So I don't think I fully appreciated the depth of fragmentation that exists in construction and the challenges and the variance that there is even just job site to job site in the same city. And so when we started the business, we built it on a technology stack. And so we said, hey, we need to take a software, a modern cutting edge software. We need to develop that and leverage a software and a computer to translate all this complexity into something that can be standardized for manufacturing. Well, when we went down that road, we didn't fully appreciate how much of the variations there are. So I'll give you an example. And this is. This is one of those little details that makes all the difference in the world. A sheer nailing pattern on the outside of a wall adds structural strength to that building. You might need 2 inches, you might need 12 inches, you might need 2 inches. Staggering that detail is something that the framer has to manually do at the job site and figure out, okay, what is the shear wall call out for this? What are the load calcs? And then they have to nail appropriately. And if they don't, the structure is literally not made sufficiently strong. So we took that kind of, and I use this analogy to say, that's a great thing for a computer to do. A computer can do that all day, every day, and then the machines are going to nail that off perfectly every single time. And so from that, it kind of spawned this philosophy where we want to leverage human beings to do what they're really good at and leverage machines to do what they're really good at. And so the highly repetitive, highly detailed, highly automatable tasks, very, very good for machines figuring out how to fix a concrete slab that's a quarter inch out of square, that's a human being's job. And they got a problem solving. They got to get creative at the job site. So it's not that we're on this march towards the Terminator and want to eradicate human beings. Our vision is to take cutting edge technology and empower human beings to do more. I love it.

Fantastic. So I'm going to pass the baton off to I love it when you call me Big Papa Tate. Litchfield Tay, what question do you have for Garrett Moore?

Garrett?

Very intriguing. I'm loving what I'm hearing. But first of all, thanks for your service and thanks for joining us. I do have a question that, as Mark said, it's not necessarily for me because I have a hammer, but I'm really not sure which end of it to use when I nail things. So, you know, it's not. This is not really a question for tape, but I do, you know, some of our listeners are a little bit more elbow grease oriented than maybe me and Mark. So my question is, we specialized in finding property and basically allowing people to live out their dream, whether that's construction or a hobby ranch or recreational property. In the future, do you see your company offering any prefab DIY kits that somebody could call you up and say, hey, Garrett, I've got this property. I'd like to have a small home or cabin or whatever it might be. Do you guys have anything that could fit the need there to come, drop it off and allow me to LEGO it together?

As of right now, no, but absolutely down the road because at the end of the day, if you can imagine, I mean, our vision is that if you could install IKEA furniture, you could build your own house because the pieces have been value engineered and they click together. There's no slop, there's no thinking and you just put them together to your point, like LEGO bricks. And so at, at scale, that's what it looks like right now. Be honest. There are some works, there are some problems we're figuring out, but at maturity, that's what it should look like. That's cool.

I mean, again, my only suggestion is please use names of things that I can pronounce when you do come out with these instructions, because the ikea, IKEA instructions, I get it, the pictures make sense, I'm a pitcher guy. But the words, it's like, so you're going to have to dumb it down. And if you need somebody to proofread this stuff for me, give me a column.

I'm your man for that.

So I'm excited though, because I really see there being a need for this. I mean, lots of people want to get out there and they want to build these cabins on their properties. And they don't want a 2500 square foot house. They want a, you know, thousand square foot house that is designed to allow them to enjoy more of the outdoors. And if you guys can fill that need at some point in the future, I know it will be well, well.

Received in the world. So it's coming.

Good stuff.

I love it.

That makes me excited. And call me when you have one ready because I got a nice property for you.

Sounds like a deal.

Fantastic. Fantastic. The Brain, the Professor, your flight school Sherpa. Scott. Todd, what question do you have?

All right, so unless I missed it, like, what's the cost of one of these things, like, what's the cost? What's it going to cost? And like, how? What's the difference? The difference between, you know, a traditional house build and something that you guys are doing?

At the end of the day, the burden's on us to meet the market. So everything that we do is at or below present value right now. Now, there's a tremendous number of variations that go into that based off of what city you're in, how the home is built, etc. But the idea is everywhere that we build, we are at or below market rate. And the big value that we're really looking to try and kind of sell and add is that there's no job site cleanup, there's no waste. The time is drastically less. We want to think of, or we want our customers and the market to start thinking of housing as a product, not a patchwork collection of services. And so the productization of a home to be more like an iPhone or a computer, where it's just like, hey, I want that model with these features, this hardware size, the screen size or whatever. I order it and I get it in three weeks. That's the mindset that we think the future is going to hold eight to ten years from now.

And then, like today, what geographic region do you deliver in or do you work in?

Unfortunately, because the demand is so high, we're still stuck trying to get out of our backyard here in California. But long term, our vision, our eastward expansion is centered around Arizona, Texas, Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee. Working our way up then into the east coast, really trying to maximize bang for the buck in terms of areas where people want to live, where there's high population growth, et cetera. And then as time goes on, back to Tate's Point, really starting to extend the reach where, yeah, you've got your kind of Amazon fulfillment centers, and then you just add more and more outreaches to the point where by the end of the decade, my goal would be that everybody is within a half day's drive of a factory, which means that we can pretty much service the entire United States.

All right, good deal. Appreciate it. Thank you.

I love it. I think, Garrett, you should think a little bigger. That's a whole other side podcast. How can we take full advantage of the $100 million investment for new housing?

The reality is, unlike most young companies that are trying to get off the ground, I'm not at risk, or I don't believe I'm at risk of sleeping out of the rain, going out of style. So there's not this concern about, hey, is the market going to like my product? A lot of our details are actually, unfortunately, things that you can't throw money at. It's a lot of that little operational nuts and bolts. And so this is one of the challenges we have. And venture investors are usually the first to say, well, here's more money, just do it faster. And sometimes money doesn't necessarily translate to speed when you've got a thousand little paper cuts and dumpster fires that you're trying to put out. So I think the biggest thing we're hoping for from this is that we start to see more and more of a federal spotlight on this issue and start to see more and more pressure or bottom up or top down pressure, saying, guys, we have a housing crisis and we also have a labor crisis. And these two are not going to fix themselves in this generation unless we take it seriously and start really doubling down on technology. Because like I said, housing is not going out of demand. So unless we're assuming the population is going to somehow stall, we've got to fix this. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

Yeah, absolutely. So as far as you know, so you're not taking investment investor money because we are the Art of Passive Income podcast, like, where's my passive income, Garrett? I like this model.

So we do absolutely, of course, take investment because this is a big problem. And to your point, you know, we're a little light on ambition, so we want to think a little bigger. And so we're, I mean, our big thing is we're looking for partners that are passionate about pushing construction into the next generation. One of the analogies we use is we want to do to construction what Tesla did to Detroit. We're not going to build every home everywhere. That's not in the cards. But if we can move the narrative and move the needle in a way where people look at site built construction as this old messy internal combustion engine and it's passe. And that's ultimately where we're passionate about and we want a bunch of others to fall in line and start trying to use technology to build as well.

I love it. I love it. I, I don't want to go around again. I'm just gonna keep asking you questions because, you know, why, why keep putting pressure on Zaino?

But.

What keeps you up at night? What, what wakes you up at three in the morning in a cold sweat?

If I'm being really honest, it's that myself or the team runs out of gas because we feel like that Sisyphusian, you know, fable of pushing a stone up a hill, and it keeps rolling down, and there are a lot of little operational problems, and the industry generally wants to see us fail because there's so much inertia to the status quo. Hey, I did. I built homes this way. My dad built homes this way. My grandpa built homes this way. You and your fancy robots and technology, like, don't bring that to my job site. And so I guess what I lose sleep over is fighting this fight and potentially just the team running out of gas before we were able to get over that hump.

Yeah. I mean, which is a very similar story to, like, a Tesla or an Uber, you know, the extremely disruptive technologies, which we wouldn't want to live without.

Exactly.

You know, today.

But it took a little bit to.

Get there, but it took a long time, you know, and it was a. It was a big fight for them to get where they were. And, you know, Tesla almost didn't make it. Uber certainly, you know, several times didn't make it. So that's. That's amazing. Garrett, what should we have asked you that we didn't ask you?

I don't know. One of the questions I usually get is, hey, Garrett, what. You know, what's the biggest. Because there is a lot of interest and there is a spotlight on the Navy SEAL community. Hey, give me something about why Navy SEALs, you know, what about that culture? What about your experience there translates over to construction? That's. Sometimes people ask because they're like, hey, you don't come from a construction background. Like, why are you even doing this?

Great question. Okay, I'm asking.

So to the latter half of that question, I think when you've got incumbent and complacent industries, oftentimes you need somebody that's completely from the outside, that's starting from a fresh perspective to solve it. And I think there's good case studies and examples of why that's been the case. Obviously, we're just talking about musk, Bezos, et cetera, because they're just. They don't come in with any of the stereotypes, preconceived notions, baggage, ptsd, whatever you want to call it. So in that case, I think it's a huge benefit. And then the second aspect is, I love technology, I love robots, and I love software, et cetera. But at the end of the day, construction is a human challenge. It's human beings prioritizing efficiency and communication towards an integrated goal and working well together. And I think that's one of the things that I've tried to bring from my SEAL career is this idea that that's not my job, is not something you'll ever hear anybody say because you're in a common fight with a common enemy. And so that, that focus on operational excellence and professionalism and contingency planning and mission planning, all of that actually translates very, very well to construction. And I believe that in order to solve this blue collar problem, you need to blend a company's culture with a roll up your sleeves, blue collar mentality. Get out to the job site. It's messy, dirty, hot, and it sucks. But also never losing sight of that white collar aspiration, because I think sometimes Silicon Valley venture money is looking for a quick fix. Show me the software app that's going to fix construction. It doesn't really work like that. And then a lot of times you've got a guy that's fighting for his livelihood to put food on the table for his wife and kids. He's got a pickup truck and a skill saw. He's like, I don't have the time to be thinking about, you know, $50 million in venture capital and industrial robotics. Like, I'm just trying to make this job work and then the next job work, et cetera. And so figuring out how to put a foot in both of those worlds is tough. And I think that's something that the SEAL culture can help bring some value to it.

I love it. And as we get to the tip of the week, I know I personally didn't say it, but I'm going to say it now, and I really do mean it. Thank you for your service. You know, it's. It's not lost on anyone on this, on this roundtable, anyone listening that, you know, without people like you, you know, sacrificing and dedicating your life, we would not have the freedoms that we have today. So. So thank you.

I got to interrupt you real quick because I got to. I got to give my stump speech, which is best job in the world. I sucked up your taxpayer dollars to jump out of planes and go over all around the world with my buddies and do a wonderful job. I have to say, the number one sacrifice is hands down, the spouses and kids. I had the good job. They had to deal with all of the negative baggage of dad being gone and all the stress without any of the upside. So I appreciate it. Thank you very much. But I have to redirect towards my lovely bride and my kids because they're the ones that really got worn out over it.

No, absolutely. So yeah, send it their way. Absolutely. Scott, what are you gonna say?

I was gonna say a buddy of mine was in the seals and he told me, you know, like, man, he's like, that was like the best time of my life because I'm out there blowing stuff up, jumping out of planes into the water. He told me about the time that they, they put Old Misery out to sea, let her float down to Mexico because they were tired of her. And then they came to the beach the next day and there she was and they were just like, how did that happen? And she's back on the beach.

The co gods hate me.

And then, then the drill sergeant or whatever basically said, apparently you guys love old Misery so you guys could to spend more time with her. And for those of you that are like, what's old Misery? It's just this heavy, heavy log that they punish these guys with. But to hear some of the stories that, that my buddy John told me, it's just crazy stuff. Jumping out of planes and the mess ups and sinking boats and all kinds of stuff.

It's a crazy bunch. I don't know.

Playing golf, playing golf. He told me he played a lot.

I love it. Well, you know, Gary, your mentorship has been invaluable and it's been a fascinating conversation. I know we've learned a lot about the future of construction and it's an exciting future. You're solving some huge problems in the country, from labor shortages to a serious housing crisis. So thank you. But I want to put you on the spot one more time and ask you for a tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passing listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

I'm actually going to give a little bit of a phrase that I picked up in buds and ironically it paid the most dividends actually in non military applications. And the phrase that you hear a lot is embrace the suck. And by that what I mean is when you are miserable and this could be, I'm thinking back to when my first was born and she was sick. It could be back to when you're freezing cold in the Pacific Ocean. There is something empowering about in that misery, focusing on the pain of others and trying to meet their needs because it does two things. It seals together a bond. It could be you and a spouse, a sibling, a co worker, doesn't matter. This is not a military issue. When you start to focus on each other's pain, it mutually reinforces the second thing it does is it's very difficult to focus on your pain and somebody else's pain at the same time. And so that was one of the key little unlocks that helps get you through buds is when you start worrying about your buddy next to you on the left or the right, you don't have time to worry about how uncomfortable and cold and tired you are. And I would say that little nugget has paid far more dividends as a husband and as a father and as a business owner than it even did getting through training.

I love it. We actually have a shirt, a landing shirt. We talk about that all the time. So we steal it from the Navy SEALs. Embrace the stock. Especially when it comes to starting a new land business. It's hard, and you've got to embrace it. And you have to be somewhat willing to be comfortable being uncomfortable in sustaining that.

And just don't quit. Like that's half the key to life or a business or whatever is marriage, kids. Just don't quit. Don't tap out. Put one foot in the front of the other, eat that elephant one bite at a time, and just don't quit.

I love it. I love it. Well, before we get to my tip of the week, I do want to just mention our sponsor, which is flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can transform your life. Go up the mountain of land, investing quickly, safely, efficiently with Scott Todd as your Sherpa. He's done it thousands of times. You're going to start building that passive income with no renters, no rehabs, no renovations, no rodents. You don't have to worry about Garrett building you a house in five days and just learn more. Go to thelandgeek.com training thelandgeek.com training oh, that fight school tuition ain't going to cost you nothing. Guaranteed you're going to make it back 180 days or less. My tip of the week is learn more about the future. Go to Agoras. Am I pronouncing that right? We'll have a link to it agoris.com and see how Agoras can help you streamline your next build. It's even just the website's amazing. Amazing, guaranteed professional quality. You could learn so much about not just construction, but business as well. Agoris.com Garrett Moore. Are we good?

We are good.

All right. Tate, are we good?

Yeah.

Thank you, Garrett. Appreciate it.

All right, well, I want to thank the listeners and remind them the only way, the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like Garrett Moore from agores.com is if you do us three little favors. Follow Rate Review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review. Supportland.com we're going to send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich, and maybe even Dirt Rich, too. Coming out soon. The plot thickens, so please do it. All right, ready to do this? 1, 2, 3. Let's Freedom.

Freedom.

All right, thanks everybody.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations or rodents? Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com training let freedom ring.