Ian Kent: Providing Affordable Housing Using Advanced Construction Technologies To Create Efficient, Compact Livable Homes

NOMAD provides affordable housing using advanced construction technologies to create efficient, compact livable homes that can be shipped worldwide and easily assembled on site without skilled trades.

Tell us about yourself?

My background is in construction, architecture, and real estate development over the past 35 years.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

I would have researched more technologies and code-related issues before creating the prototype. This would have avoided our versions 1 and 2 and reduced the overall timeline to market.

What problem does your business solve?

The high cost, complexity, and risk of conventional construction and the affordability of the home’s end-price. It also addresses yard space restrictions, impacts on neighbors, and building in remote locations.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

Throughout my experience in real estate, I’ve realized that the construction industry is antiquated, harmful to the environment, labour intensive, and cost prohibitive. I also learned that applying advanced technologies and reducing the size of living spaces are the most effective ways to address these issues.

This inspired me to create the smallest livable space using computer-driven, prefabricated components that can be easily shipped flat-packed and assembled on site by non-skilled labour to reduce cost.

We now produce a very livable, modern dwelling that meets all of the stringent building codes in North America and provides extreme affordability for ADU’s and multi-family projects.

What is your magic sauce?

Our housing products provide the option for homeowners to reduce costs by using non-skilled labor and DIY. It is also modular, allowing purchasers to add modules as their situation changes, or use modules to produce rental income. The NOMAD Cube can also ship flat-packed worldwide and accommodate almost any building code requirement.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

Complete several multi-family projects to demonstrate true affordability, more efficient and cost-effective construction, and more environmentally-responsible ways to live, while providing proof of concept to bring more real estate developers on board.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Adoption of smaller living spaces by individuals, the real estate development industry, and city planners/politicians has been the main barrier to market. Long permit processing times also affects cashflow that has been difficult to navigate.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

We’d like to reach out to property owners and real estate developers small and large who would like to learn about the advantages of working with our products and how they can leverage our competitive cost per unit and density solutions within existing property zoning.