Colony Homes General Manager John Bowser knows what goes into a well-built home, having spent many years in management at Universal Forest Products.
His experience working with engineered lumber for roof trusses brought him to the Commodore-owned, Pennsylvania-based builder.
“Our houses have so many different options,” Bowser said. “We’ll add or change anything you can think of as long as it doesn’t slow down our line.”
Colony has been building homes for 30 years. Add a ceramic shower, shiplap accent wall, stone on the fireplace, or dormer kits, for instance, and the Shippenville, Pa., factory still can produce seven floors per day, as it has for decades.
The Beacon, a Multi-Section Home from Colony
The Commodore family of brands brought several homes to The Louisville Show, running Jan. 15-17 at the Kentucky Exposition Center. One of those homes is the Beacon, a larger floor plan in the Prestige line — 28 by 56 feet — with four bedrooms and two baths.
“This is a value house,” Bowser said. “We’re selling more of this model than anything else we do.
“We can remove one of the bedrooms and replace it with a hobby room, or if you want to make it into a modular, put drywall in it,” Bowser said.
The home is designed for placement on homeowner land. However, some manufactured home communities with larger lots can take the home as well. Colony Homes provides its factory-crafted homes to 14 states in the northeast.
“Every year in July we have a home show with Commodore and PennWest right in the parking lot of the Shippenville plant,” Bowser said. “We get seven or eight homes set up, and have all the dealers come out. We find a lot of success doing that, and this home was received very well.”
The Louisville Show Runs Through Friday
The 2020 Louisville Manufactured Housing Show started Wednesday and runs through Friday. The show is open to industry professionals only.
Dennis Hill, whose company Show Ways Unlimited, organizes the event, said a tally of registrations midday on Wednesday came in at 3,377 manufactured housing industry professionals.
“That’s a count we did at 1 p.m. on the first day and we were only a couple of hundred registrations shy of last year’s entire three-day tally,” Hill said. “And last year was a record year, so we’re very happy with that. It’s clear that the industry is finding the value we provide here.”3
MHInsider will continue to report manufactured housing professional news from Louisville throughout the show.
