Half the Cost, One-Third the Time? Inside Malibu’s Manufactured Home Rebuild Strategy

Trace McGuire (00:00)
So in an area like Malibu and the Palisades, where you’re kind of in this bubble of LA where prices are crazy in general. I mean, gas is crazy. I think we’re at seven, eight dollars a gallon. You do see the inflation of construction prices just because it trickles down. So in an area like Malibu or the Palisades, you’re seeing on-site bids anywhere from eight hundred to twelve hundred dollars a square foot. Our highest-end homes and foundations are five.

So there’s a significant amount of money being saved for those clients.

Joseph Crooms (02:08)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros Podcast. Guess what? I got a very important guest here I’m looking to chat with. His name is Trace McGuire, who’s making some serious moves in California. I’m gonna let them talk a little bit more about that. Hey, Trace, I’m glad to have you here. Say hello to everyone.

Trace McGuire (02:31)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Joseph. Thanks for getting everyone fired up. Yeah, we’re The Home Gallery.

Joseph Crooms (02:37)
Alright, so listen, so since you mentioned you’re The Home Gallery, let’s just dive into this. So first of all, for people who may not be familiar with your world, Trace, give us the short version. What’s your main focus these days, and what markets are you operating?

Trace McGuire (02:54)
Yep. We are a high-end manufactured home builder. Simple terminology to that is I build the same exact home as that you build on-site. I just build it in a factory in about fifteen days. We service all of Southern California, and our goal is to replace traditional construction.

Joseph Crooms (03:16)
Trace, when I was speaking to you, you mentioned the—the fires that were happening in California, especially in your area. How has that affected your market?

Trace McGuire (03:25)
Yeah. so the company was founded about 10 years ago. Woolsey Fire happened. That was a massive fire here in Malibu. We ended up doing probably about twenty percent of those rebuilds and helping those clients get through that. And then, as of late, we had the Palisades and Eaton fires, and we’re helping a ton of families there. We probably have sixty-plus active projects just from that recent fire. It is a terrible event, but we are helping a ton of families for a lot of reasons: speed, affordability, and getting them back home as fast as possible.

Joseph Crooms (04:03)
Some of the homes in the area is completely burned down, Trace, and then the family’s hurting. Tell us, how do they feel?

Trace McGuire (04:11)
Look, I think it’s a crazy situation that probably no one you’ve known has been in, losing a house like that. Our goal is to help these people as much as possible. I try and give as much information as possible—you know, budgets, estimates, floor plans. We do all design totally free of charge in-house. We don’t charge, you know, crazy architecture fees, but our goal is just to help them show that you can build a beautiful, amazing home in a factory in a third of the time for half the cost and still have a beautiful home.

Joseph Crooms (04:51)
The homes that you build, are they three-family, one-family homes, duplexes? Can you share that with us?

Trace McGuire (05:48)
Yeah, we build homes of all sizes. I build homes from four hundred square foot ADUs all the way to six thousand square foot main residences. We also build duplexes, triplexes, for maybe the more investor side, but I build homes of all sizes. We do specialize in single-story homes, as we don’t do two-story.

Joseph Crooms (06:12)
And since these fires have happened and your business started ten years ago, probably in between when and then the next one happened in the Palisades, how much volume have you moved since then?

Trace McGuire (06:23)
We build a ton of homes. We probably have built over a hundred homes in this area, just Malibu and Agoura and the Santa Monica Mountains region. But yeah, we do a ton of projects—fire rebuilds, new construction, ADUs, anything related to new construction in Southern California.

Joseph Crooms (06:46)
And what is your—how many homes have you built in the last year? What is your volume that you built?

Trace McGuire (06:52)
It varies. Every year is different, but we’re currently delivering four to five homes a month and have been for the past few years. So we do install a lot of homes, and I think that’s something that’s different about us than your traditional builder. Because we build a home in fifteen days in the factory and can set it up within three months on the property, we have the ability to install a ton of homes.

And we’re doing that currently.

Joseph Crooms (07:23)
Talked about that you build in the factory. Can you share what the process looks like from when you build it, and then you said you take about three months to lay the home on the property?

Trace McGuire (07:34)
Yeah. I think the simplest explanation is imagine how they build your Porsche in the factory. It’s a production line. There’s over five hundred workers in the factory. The home moves on an assembly line in multiple pieces. Everything is built in the factory, so the homes come fully complete, all the way down to quartz and granite countertops, custom appliances. So it’s really beautiful.

And a really cool way to see how a home is built. Everything’s ergonomical. They’re building roofs at eye level versus having guys hang from a roof twenty feet in the air and hammer nails in. So it is a beautiful way to build a house.

Joseph Crooms (08:19)
What’s the average home that you build? What’s the average size? Is it two-family, one-family? Can you share that with us?

Trace McGuire (08:26)
They vary. It depends if we’re doing, you know, ranch estates or smaller ADUs, but I can tell you a good example from the recent fires. Everything is custom that we do. So because of the fire rebuild and building within footprints and staying within the fast-track permits, we do have to customize every house. But I can say that you see a lot of homes in that two thousand, twenty-five hundred square foot range.

And I think a lot of people in this rebuild, you know, they had just normal little single-family homes, maybe fifteen, eighteen hundred square feet, and we’re helping rebuild those.

Joseph Crooms (09:09)
When you say that you save the money, Trace, you know, instead of building a traditional home, when you come, how much money do you about save them in—in comparison to a traditional home?

Trace McGuire (09:22)
So in an area like Malibu and the Palisades, where you’re kind of in this bubble of LA where prices are crazy in general. I mean, gas is crazy. I think we’re at seven, eight dollars a gallon. You do see the inflation of construction prices just because it trickles down. So in an area like Malibu or the Palisades, you’re seeing on-site bids anywhere from eight hundred to twelve hundred dollars a square foot. Our highest-end homes and foundations are five.

So there’s a significant amount of money being saved for those clients.

Joseph Crooms (10:32)
What is your competition like? Do you have other fabricators or as competition, or you—or are you the man?

Trace McGuire (10:40)
I think there’s always competition. I’m always welcoming competition. I think you’ll see, even from the recent fires, there’s a lot of people that have flooded to this area and tried to, you know, say, “Hey, we’re from Colorado. We, you know, build these types of homes.” But I will tell you, we have been in Malibu for over ten years. You know, we have our roots here. We have a ton of client referrals that drive our business. So I’m always welcome to competition, but we stay in our lane and just do what we do best.

Joseph Crooms (11:18)
Trace, when you said that you were in real estate before, more traditional, what got you into this market?

Trace McGuire (11:26)
Yeah, I was in the commercial side before, commercial retail brokerage, numbers-crunching guy, pro formas, all that good stuff. I was brought into the company to help on the development side, so on development projects outside of our client-facing projects. And yeah, was brought in and very happy about it.

Joseph Crooms (11:53)
What is your position in the company now?

Trace McGuire (11:56)
I run all sales and marketing for the company.

Joseph Crooms (11:58)
Okay. So on this question, I know this is not easy in this climate, but what’s been the key to keeping the machine running smoothly?

Trace McGuire (12:10)
I think is—I think the key to keeping the machine running smoothly is just doing your best you can do. Our goal is to make sure the clients are as happy as possible and everything that we do. Spending the extra time with them, spending, you know, the extra time to make sure everything’s perfect design-wise, budget-wise, and really just giving them a great experience. And it truthfully leads later on to more deals and more clients because you get that great experience.

Joseph Crooms (12:44)
How do your clients find you, Trace?

Trace McGuire (12:48)
A wide variety ways. We have billboards, magazines, all the types of advertising you can. But like I said, all of our clients, I’d like to say, you know, love us, and we do have a good connection with them. So we do get a lot of client referrals, as well as, you know, you’ll probably see our billboard in town.

Joseph Crooms (13:10)
So say I lost my home and you did one for me. Is it like a wildfire in a sense that, what, you built this beautiful home for me, you saved me money, I tell the story?

Trace McGuire (13:22)
Yeah, exactly. We have a lot of client testimonials. I think a great thing too is we show a ton of our clients’ homes. So past clients’ homes, they’ll open up their homes to us to show the new buyers. So I think that that’s a huge testament too, is, you know, our clients welcome us in and say, “Hey, this is a great house. The Home Gallery was great. You know, feel free to come in and check it out.”

Joseph Crooms (13:47)
All the codes have to be met when you—even though you’re fabricating it inside. Can you share what’s the most difficult thing about fabricating a home in the factory that’s probably different from doing it traditionally?

Trace McGuire (14:01)
Yeah, I think your custom construction is always gonna be there. And when I’m talking custom, I’m talking super high-end, twenty-five-foot interior ceilings and rounded walls. I think that will always be a thing. But—and it’s hard to achieve in the factory some really custom things like that, for a wide variety of reasons. But we do still build with all standard construction materials, beautiful homes that the everyday person loves and would love to have and can afford. So there is intricacies that you can’t get in a factory. You know, maybe heights of certain rooms, you know, a 20-foot interior ceiling. But we can get, you know, 12-foot interior ceilings, and that’s more than enough for a lot of people.

Joseph Crooms (15:39)
And that’s—when you were saying that there’s a few challenges, could you just sort of ex-explain what you were gonna say? You—you—you’re very vague about it. But just for our listeners, when you say there are challenges doing fabricated versus traditional, can you just elaborate on one of them or two of them, whatever you have?

Trace McGuire (15:59)
I think a valid one is—to what we build to, we build to the federal HUD Code—is a two-story home. Because we build our homes on steel I-beam chassis, it’s difficult to stack sections. So there is two-story HUD-manufactured homes out there, but it is difficult. So that’s a good example and why we specialize in single-story homes.

Joseph Crooms (16:25)
Trace, this may be—I don’t know—but I think it’s a relevant question. Because of the fires that have happened, what have you done to sorta protect and also save insurance for people that may do these fabricated homes? Are there any unique things that you have done with the homes themselves?

Trace McGuire (16:45)
We build our homes to the highest fire codes in California. So we build to the WUI Code—Wildland-Urban Interface. As for insurance purposes relating to that, that’s a huge deal for our clients. A lot of insurance companies like seeing stuff like that because we’re building with fire-rated windows and vents and roofs and cement Hardie board exteriors. So there is a benefit in—to the construction that we do and the fire hardiness that relates to insurance and our clients, you know, getting good insurance policies.

Joseph Crooms (17:22)
Thanks for that, Trace. Now, every operator I know had a moment where things just got real. Maybe a deal that went sideways or a time they had to pivot fast. Would you mind sharing one of those with us?

Trace McGuire (17:35)
I’m not sure. I think every day you have to pivot, and every day you have to, you know, put out fires and assist clients the best you can. So haven’t really seen a—a major moment where that happens. More so, it probably just happens every day.

Joseph Crooms (17:53)
Gotcha, okay. So that’s the kind of stuff people don’t talk about enough. And I’m so happy that you haven’t seen those every day. It—but it’s what separate—what separates the folks who just dabble from the ones who stay in the game a long term? And you’ve been in there for ten years. Let me ask you this: What are you focused on solving next or scaling next?

Trace McGuire (18:16)
Yeah, every day you have to get better and get better at your craft. And even though we’ve been in this business for a long time, there still is new items that pop up every day. We were chatting about kind of the permitting process and us dealing with cities and counties. My goal is to just keep refining our team and getting faster at getting permits.

And maybe it’s not getting faster, but more just understanding what the city and county need and are looking for because their ideas might have changed in the past few months of what’s needed to get a permit. So it’s just every day working to get better and work with city and county and get those permits, as well as, on the manufacturing side, pushing the limits of what we can do in the factory. Our homes have come light-years from our original homes ten years ago, and every day we just keep kind of pushing forward and doing really cool new stuff in the house.

Joseph Crooms (19:14)
What do you think your annual revenue that you have generated from sales in the past year? Okay. What about volume?

Trace McGuire (19:21)
We can’t discuss that.

Yep, like I mentioned, we install about four to five homes—

Joseph Crooms (19:31)
And is that a increase from where you’ve been at the beginning of this year, or has it been more trendy now that people are finding out and they say they’re jumping on board?

Trace McGuire (19:42)
We’ve stayed pretty steady. The fires happened a few years back, and so we stay pretty steady in—in that regard.

Joseph Crooms (19:50)
Okay. That’s big. Okay, so now I know a lot of our listeners are either early in their journey or looking to level up. I think they benefit from this. I know a lot of people, when it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what’s the biggest difference for you?

Trace McGuire (20:11)
I think the biggest difference is just being yourself, surrounding yourself with people that you want to do business with, that are, you know, if you’re as responsive as—as I am and hoping that they’re as responsive as you are, that’s great. You know, but mostly just working with people that you want to keep working with. Finding your niche.

Joseph Crooms (20:33)
Are you looking to break in—into any new markets outside of California?

Trace McGuire (20:38)
We are pretty busy at the moment. So at the moment, we’re just gonna keep our head down and stay busy here.

Joseph Crooms (20:45)
So you can’t fake relationships. They’re everything in this space. So all right, before we wrap up, if someone wanted to reach out to you, Trace, maybe collaborate or learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way to reach out to you?

Trace McGuire (20:59)
Yep, you can go on our website. It’s thehomegallery.com, or you can give us a call at 1-800-444-HOME.

Joseph Crooms (21:08)
And you know what? Somebody’s like me, looking for a pen, trying to get all the information. You mind repeating it again, Trace?

Trace McGuire (21:14)
Yep, you can go to our website. It’s thehomegallery.com, or you can give us a call at 1-800-444-HOME.

Joseph Crooms (21:23)
Okay, thank you so much. So perfect. So listen, I appreciate your time. I appreciate your sincerity. You—I can see it all. It comes through—your sincerity, your passion for the business. Thank you for that, Trace. We need more people in this space who are doing the right things the right way. Thanks again for being here. And for those of you tuning in, I know you got value from this. Make sure you subscribe. We got more conversations coming from operators just like Trace McGuire, who out there building real business but also helping real communities and helping individual families. That’s key. I’ll see you at the next episode of what? Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros Podcast.