A 37-minute drive on I-74 in North Carolina near the South Carolina line connects a pair of home building facilities recently acquired by two of the largest manufactured home builders in the country.
Cavco Industries has agreed to acquire a 184,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in Hamlet, N.C. that will be modified to produce HUD code homes.
To the south, in Robeson County, Champion Homes has confirmed it will begin operating out of a former Fleetwood Homes facility with plans for more than $13 million in upgrades.
The two companies are leaders in manufactured housing, each with a large and growing presence across the United States.
“In Pembroke we found a site that met our facility needs, had access to strong workforce assets and was capable of serving a growing regional housing market. We are appreciative of North Carolina’s leaders who were willing to work closely with Champion to address our objectives for this expansion,” Champion Homes Executive Vice President of Sales and Business Development Wade Lyall was quoted as saying in The Robesonian, a local news outlet.
Champion Home Builders is a division of Skyline Champion Corporation, the largest publicly traded manufactured home and modular builder in North America with approximately 8,100 people, nearly 70 years of homebuilding experience, and 40 manufacturing facilities.
“On behalf of the Robeson County Board of Commissioners, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Champion Home as an industrial partner to Robeson County,” Wixie Stephen, chairperson of the Robeson County Board of Commissioners, state for the paper. “This investment will provide a brighter future for citizens of Robeson County in both tax base and jobs.”
Cavco Industries Converts Factory
Cavco President and CEO Bill Boor said the seller, Volumetric Building Companies, currently produces multi-family residential and commercial projects in the facility but intends to move that production closer to their markets in the Northeast. VBC’s work will wind down during the summer, at which time Cavco will begin re-tooling and renovations to allow its homebuilding operation on the site to begin before the end of the year.
“Demand for our homes, and affordable homes in general, continues to be very strong. With the addition of this new facility, which will bring our total number of homebuilding production lines to 27, we are expanding access to much-needed affordable housing solutions and strengthening our position in the region,” Boor said. “This is a great opportunity to quickly bring new capacity online with an in-place and capable workforce.”
Cavco is headquartered in Phoenix and designs and produces factory-built housing products primarily distributed through a network of independent and company-owned retailers. Its brands include Cavco, Fleetwood, Palm Harbor, Nationwide, Fairmont, Friendship, Chariot Eagle, Destiny, Commodore, Colony, Pennwest, R-Anell, Manorwood, and MidCountry homes.
