North Carolina Custom Modulars’ motto, ‘make your dream a reality,’ says it all. Fully committed to the customer, the Asheboro, North Carolina-based business goes the extra mile to ensure that buyers have the ability to purchase their dream home.
“What sets us apart in the industry versus a lot of our competitors is we can actually buy land, build a house, and then sell it to a customer,” explains General Manager Crystal Rothstein. “The reason we do it this way is because we do so many veterans’ loans, and this offers them the opportunity to finance without having a construction loan, because the VA doesn’t have construction money.”
This is a major departure from the industry standard, and the team is careful to mitigate any risks so that its out-of-the-box business model produces a win-win for all parties involved. “Most retail locations around us require a construction loan for a customer to build,” Rothstein says. “I can actually circumvent that. To solidify things, I will turn their contract in [to the bank] with their floor plan,” she explains. “We turn that into the bank of their choice, and they generate an appraisal based on their project, the land they’re buying, and they’ll do a credit underwrite for me. And that’s when they issue me what I call a commitment letter that lets me know I am good to go, and we hit the ground running and buy land or go ahead and order a house for them. Once the house gets there, then we finish their construction and then just sell them the whole project at the end.”
Not surprisingly, North Carolina Custom Modulars is a very popular choice for veterans seeking a home. Many of these customers would not be able to afford to buy a house without the creative purchasing model the company offers. For example, the team recently built a home for a customer who had “tried for two years to build a house,” Rothstein recalls. “And their banker actually found me, and that’s how they’re in a house now.”
This approach eliminates extra steps and extra costs. With a typical construction loan, “you have to have 20 percent down,” says Rothstein. “They’ll make you close upfront, and then any time a builder draws from that, you’re making interest payments. We eliminate that time. So there’s typically just one closing and no payments during their build, and then they just pay us with their loan when we’re finished. The bank will come back out and make sure they have heat, water, everything the house needs for them to move in, and that’s when they’ll schedule a closing for them.”
As the name implies, customization is another factor that sets North Carolina Custom Modulars apart and helps turn a customer’s dreams into reality. The company offers seven different home models at its location and 200-plus floor plans they can also choose from, all of which can be adapted to fit individual needs and tastes. This can include anything from moving a wall to substituting a kitchen from a different model into the model the customer is using for their build.
“We can pick and choose options,” says Rothstein. “What I usually tell a customer when they come in here is, it comes back to your space flow and your budget, what you’re looking to spend. And then we can help them work backwards from there depending on the things that they want to do—if they want to add an upstairs or put a basement under the house, that kind of thing. It really comes back to the client, what they’re looking to do with the home,” she says. As a result, nearly every home the team builds is customized to at least some degree.
This level of customization is unusual within the industry. “Most [modular companies] don’t want to do what we do because it’s time consuming,” says Rothstein. But North Carolina Custom Modulars is set up to go the extra mile. “Each salesperson works with that customer on what they’re looking to do. [For example], we want to move this wall over a foot so that the master bedroom is bigger. We want to stretch the house to 76 feet long so that they have four bedrooms—that kind of thing.” The sales team sits down with customers one on one to design a specific floor plan that matches the customer’s vision, “so they get exactly what they want.”
Customer satisfaction is so high, in fact, that the company largely relies on satisfied customers to attract new business. “We run probably about a 45 percent referral rate here at the office just because of word-of-mouth; we don’t do a whole lot of advertising,” Rothstein says.
“We have our own Service Manager that does a walkthrough when a customer moves into their new home. She handles any service issues with the customer for the first year of moving into their new home,” she tells us. “Our company also has two construction managers to make your site work and home buying experience seamless from start to finish. This eliminates the stress for a homeowner of trying to figure out what steps to take to build a home.”
North Carolina Custom Modulars works with three different manufacturers to create its custom homes. This way, the team is able to select the manufacturer that “offers everything that [the customer is] looking for in a home,” to provide the best, most effective option for each specific build. In addition, North Carolina Custom Modulars’ manufacturers—R-Anell Homes, Champion, and Holmes Building Systems—are all located in North Carolina, so everything is made in America.
Building in a factory, of course, provides some unique advantages, from a quicker build time to long-term savings on energy spending. “The bonus to a modular home is the controlled environment,” Rothstein says. “It’s built in a manufacturing facility, and then when we get it to the customer site, we actually set it with a crane and finish all the site work on site. So the timeframes are better.”
Building materials are also a factor. “They’re actually built with 20 to 30 percent more lumber [than conventional construction],” Rothstein says. “My exterior wall standard for my company is two by six exterior walls. Typical construction is two by four. So it gives them a higher R rating and is more energy efficient.”
The team had to navigate some difficult terrain over the last few years, but has managed to bounce back better than ever. “During COVID, prices were changing,” Rothstein remembers. “At least once a month we would have a price increase. And, honestly, all I could do was call the customer, and they could decide if they wanted to keep going or stop… But after that, everything leveled off, and we’ve been blessed to have had our best year ever last year. We did 44 houses last year.”
Looking ahead, the team expects to continue on this upward trend to deliver customized dream homes through an affordable business model. “We’ve pretty much doubled our numbers every year,” Rothstein says. “The future’s bright for us here.”
