Since August I've started getting inquiries about building container structures from various places. Things are picking up, and it's high time. The week after the Build It Green tour the market collasped. Four hundred people came to look at what a container house could be. The immediate response was terrific but we all know how the rest of the year played out. So when my phone rang I was more than happy to arrange a tour. I've added more interior pictures in this post to give you a better idea of what we built.
A couple in Santa Cruz, California actually came to Portland to see the 42nd Street project. They called a few day's after I gave them a tour and asked if I was interested in building a modified copy of the Portland model. They had a limited, but adequate, budget and the land. The land turned out to be a beautiful hillside site just a mile or so from downtown. They had a road and a well with good water and perk tested geology suitable for septic. I know what the costs are to build and I'd be able to use the same engineering so I was confident that we could bring the project in with the capital they had, until we asked what the permit was going to cost. I spent a week in Santa Cruz to do the site survey with them and talk to the permit authorities to confirm costs.
California, as you may have heard, is bankrupt. The county of Santa Cruz is broke too. They are, however, still staffed up and need to bring in money to make payroll. They aren't honest enough to tell you outright what the permit cost will eventually be. Our first quote was $11,077 for the submittal fee. What they didn't say was that after reviewing the plans they would return with comments that would need to be addressed. But before they would look at your response they wanted the client to deposit $20,000 that they could bill hourly against. So were up to $31,077 with no permit in site. The plans are distributed to 11 departments which all comment and find reasons to bill. A local builder that I spoke with said they seldom issued a single family home permit for less than $60,000. The client called in a favor and we got a meeting with a senior planner that confirmed all this, he said "the county has been forced to go into fee collecting mode" This project is based on building a 640 square foot house, not some high end mansion.
At this rate the cost of the permits which didn't even hook up to any municipal utilities would run about the same as the actual cost of construction. The client said they'd get back to me when they could arrange the additional financing.
I got a call from Chennai, India from a guy that was looking for a builder qualified to teach his shop workers the basics of container modification. He has an ambitious plan to build various structures from containers. It took me a week to unpack and understand the scope of the plans that he emailed me. He wanted to market every thing from single container retail shops to multi container prefabricated schools. He expressed that he had a large transnational engineering firm to support the project and the investment capital to see it through. I thought, "this is it", a late career move to do exactly what I wanted, expand to concept of container structures to a global market. We traded emails for about a month that were supposed to lead to a four to six week trip to India. Everything we talked about looked very promising until we started talking about money. I've done business in the far east before. I know that once you've transferred all the intellectual property, the actual know how, that's it. You come home with wages but no future prospects. In order to book that sort of time out of town you'd expect that they could come up with a retainer. I even offered to send them my engineering that represents all the basic container modifications. I haven't heard from them since. In this age of global internet connectivity you never really know who your talking to. My best guess is that Prem, the guy I was talking to was just some kid with a well thought out idea that he thought he could string together. But when it came down to it he didn't really have any idea what this kind of thing entails. I'd love to work on a project like that someday but I guess India will have to wait until I get that $2500 retainer.
The news reports say that the economy is picking up steam, that we're in recovery. That's great news. I'm hoping that I'll hear from somebody that needs an builder with container experience, I'm available. I can travel to any location and help with everything from planning and logistics to construction.
