#234: Brad DeHays (Connect Housing Blocks) — Building the Future of Housing, Construction, and Modular’s Potential

Brad DeHays [00:00:00]:
This entire process and then this factory was born out of frustration in construction. So by the time a unit leaves this room, and we're doing four units a day in this room, it is drywalled, taped and mudded. Complete frame is built with plumbing in the floor and electrical in the wall. Completely insulated, fire suppression already installed, finished flooring already installed and ready to move out. So if you think about the amount of time it would take to do that on job site, we are already five months ahead by the time it leaves this room. It's just, it's a complete game changer from that dynamic.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:30]:
Hello everyone, I am Jeffrey Stern, your host of today's Ohio Fund report with Brad DeHayes, founder and CEO of Connect Real Estate and Connect Housing Blocks. This conversation with Brad explores the journey of a developer turned innovator who began buying small distressed properties while still in college and has since built one of the most ambitious real estate and housing manufacturing platforms in the whole country. Through Connect Real Estate, Brad has become known for tackling projects that others have overlooked, transforming abandoned power plants, trolley barns and neglected downtown buildings into vibrant new places that preserve their history while meeting today's needs. That same entrepreneurial vision inspired Brad to launch Connect Housing Blocks, headquartered in a 630,000 square foot modular housing facility that is now one of the largest modular apartment factories in the world. Proudly based here in Ohio, using state of the art equipment and prefabrication methods can Connect Housing Blocks produces high quality apartments from start to finish, eliminating nearly all measuring, cutting and heavy lifting from the process. The result is faster, more efficient and more consistent housing production at scale and at lower cost. Brad's story is ultimately about seeing possibility where others see prohibitive obstacles and reimagining an industry stuck in old processes. And fittingly, our conversation today takes place right in the heart of Connect Housing Block's facility, offering a clear picture at the true scale and ambition of what Brad and his team have built.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:57]:
In our discussion, Brad shares how he has navigated the multiple chapters of Starting and Scaling Connect, the founding insight that led him to pursue industrial scale modular housing in the first place, how he engages communities and leverages public private partnerships, his unique approach to talent and culture, the dire state of housing in America today, and his vision for solving it by massively scaling up our housing production capability. So please enjoy this awesome conversation with Brad Hayes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:01]:
Amidst a housing crisis. Affordability, availability, supply of housing is breaking across the country. And the conversation over the last decade or so, policy or otherwise, you know, circles around interest rates, tax incentives and breaks. Unit counting, but to me seems to kind of miss the forest through the trees of the underlying fundamental need to drive unit costs down and massively increase our production capabilities. So before we talk about connect housing blocks and the work you're doing to actually build out that production capability to move the needle on the problem, I kind of want to ground the whole conversation today in the problem itself and how you think about what the problem is, the scale, the scope of it, and just paint a picture for how and why you feel this opportunity even exists in the first place.

Brad DeHays [00:05:04]:
I think when you look at the problem of rising prices and unsustainable demand that is not being met with supply, you have to look at all the factors that go into it. And I think all of these factors, when we talk about it, people that are in different fields will typically they'll navigate to the field that kind of ties to their field because their level expertise. So if you talk to bankers and you talk to nonprofits, they may talk about financing. You know, if you talk about, you know, you talk to law firms, you may, you know, you may talk about eviction rates, you may talk about policy. Yeah, if you're talking to accounting firms, you may talk about, you know, tax reform. With regards to real estate, you talk to real estate agents, it's about supply and loans, availability of capital. If you talk to builders, they're, they're going to say it's labor. They're going to say it's labor.

Brad DeHays [00:06:05]:
They may point a little bit to some of the supply issues with regards to tariffs. Yeah, because that's a hot button item. But you know, I look at really the supply and demand curve over 15 years, what has really affected it. And I was a developer in the 0809 crisis. I was a developer in Covid. And one thing that I remember is coming out of the 0809 crisis, from 2012 to 2019, when interest rates were floating around zero. And we were able to get commercial mortgage rates in the threes and low fours. We still didn't build enough.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:45]:
Yep.

Brad DeHays [00:06:46]:
And so I started thinking about what was our reasons for not building enough when that happened. And it always comes down to construction. I've had a construction company for 25 years. We've been scaling it nonstop. And really what we've seen is it's just a move in the labor portion of construction that has been unsustainable. We have less and less people in the trades and more and more demand for the product. So I think that that's like a. But that's the most difficult thing to talk about.

Brad DeHays [00:07:19]:
You know, we can talk about education of the trades, but the reality is I am like the youngest of generation X. So you know, I was born in 1979. I think 1980 might be the cutoff.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:34]:
Yep.

Brad DeHays [00:07:34]:
And I was the last tranche of shop class and we had shop class and vocational schools and there really wasn't a stigma about it, just putting a tool in someone's hand at that time. And a lot of people our age had, you know, relatives, parents, grandparents that were in the trades or in manufacturing and it wasn't as strange to them to be doing work on the weekends or work in the evenings or help participate in some kind of hands on trade at some point. Right after my generation it really got heavy in tech and Internet, which I.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:14]:
Think obviously I never went to shop class.

Brad DeHays [00:08:15]:
You know, that's exactly right. You're definitely not a Generation X, Right. Yeah. So I think that movement in itself started to shift and it started to shift and it started a stigma that now, you know, a lot of people are trying to bring themselves back to is how do we train people in the skilled trades. And the reality of it is, you know, there's such a gap between the 45 year old worker and the 20 year old worker and it's unsustainable, it's hard to, it's difficult to fill. And I think, you know, there's been some noble efforts in education and certifications of skilled trades, but it's just, there's just too much demand, too much capital out there compared to the amount of people willing to do the work. So this imbalance is really something without, you know, catastrophic change. We're just not going to be able to, definitely not going to be able to turn it around, but we're not even going to be able to stabilize it.

Brad DeHays [00:09:14]:
And I think that's a fact that everybody now is directly coming in contact with.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:19]:
Yeah. So Take us back to your realization over time, or maybe it was acute of construction as the bottleneck. And when you felt within you this desire to make the leap from developer to ask yourself, hey, maybe we need to actually reinvent the entire production process itself to address this problem, I think.

Brad DeHays [00:09:42]:
It wasn't an epiphany by any means. I think it was basically this entire process. And then this factory was born out of frustration in construction. So we've had a construction company for 25 years that we started, and my partner in that construction company is AJ Hawk, the football player. And then I have another partner, Bradley Annan, that runs our general contracting side, and he's fantastic. We started seeing that it was more and more difficult to fill vacant roles, and it was more difficult to scale. And then we started seeing our friends that had subcontracting companies begin to be bought out by venture capital. And we started looking at this, and we were thinking, okay, venture capital does not enter an industry with the expectation of making less money next year.

Brad DeHays [00:10:36]:
So what we started to see is that, you know, with venture capital moves into the industry, there was a vertical push in wages, there was a vertical push in prices. And when that would normalize, we knew that we were, you know, we were in trouble. We were in trouble on the general contractor side dealing with subcontractors, and then on the developer side with regard to cost of projects. So, yeah, this happened, I think, started to happen in 2015, 2016, and then really it just got, you know, 17, 18, 19, it really got volume, got going. So by the time, I think it was 2017, we had a group that came to town, a fund that was out of Washington, D.C. that was started by some very prominent people in the tech industry called Revolution. And they had a fund of funds that. One of them was called Rise the Rest.

Brad DeHays [00:11:32]:
And they had a.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:33]:
This is Steve Cases.

Brad DeHays [00:11:34]:
Steve Cases fund. Yep. And so they had called the Columbus Partnership here in Columbus and wanted to meet with a developer to just to get a lay of the land for central Ohio. And I received that call, and they asked if I would spend time with the Rise of the Rest fund. So I did. And they had a director named Tom Danelek. And Tom is fantastic. He was the managing director of Heinz, which is a huge office management company across the United States.

Brad DeHays [00:12:05]:
So newest stuff was from Chicago. And we hit it off, and we spent several days together. And he probably made three trips where we literally would spend all day together. And I think it was maybe the third trip where he said, you know, and I Helped keep them out of some bad deals. I don't want to say that I got them into any great deals, but, you know, the market then was really hot. So we look at, you know, saving money and staying out of bad deals is sometimes better than getting in great deals. And so at the end, he said, hey, Brad, I feel like we owe you something. And I didn't have any projects for them because we were doing heavily incentivized tax credit deals at the time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:44]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:12:45]:
And we just kind of were in our path. But he said, we had invested. Have you ever thought about modular? And I said, you know, I've heard about it, but I don't know much about it. And I was thinking manufactured homes, and I was thinking double wides and kind of the whole Clayton homes type concept. I said, you know, it's not really the space I really want to be in. He goes, no, Brad, there's a movement here I think you need to be a part of. And we invested in a company on the west coast that is called Blockable, that is out of Seattle, and they have their prototype facility in Portland. And he goes, would you like to go check it out? I said, you mean I can go out there and tour their prototype facility? And he said, yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:13:32]:
I said, why would they let me do that? And he said, well, we're one of their largest investors, and we think that we can make it happen. I said, absolutely. So I went out there, I met with them, and I spent the day with, know their CEO and their coo.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:47]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:13:48]:
And I'm a builder that we had our own. Our own trades group. So we literally did employed finished carpenters, rough carpenters, masons. So we understand what we call methods and means of construction. So when I went out there, I quickly could see, okay, I see why their product makes sense, but I would do it differently. And a lot of times, that's what it is. You see someone's product and you just say, okay, I like that they did this and this, but I think this would work different. And what I did is I came back and I started thinking about, all right, how can we create a product that uses the same materials that we use in standard construction, but establish a process around it to where the process streamlines everything? And we started looking at manufacturing.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:39]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:14:40]:
And we started looking at other companies. And those companies, a lot of them would try to leg into the business and maybe do 100,000 square feet. And if you do something like that, that's great. But then you've got to rely on the Skill set of the worker. And essentially you're doing construction indoors at that point.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:58]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:14:59]:
So we knew that we had to do something that was large enough that would be very high barrier to entry, but we would be able to do manufacturing. So we started bringing in automotive engineers and we started putting together a line. But it was for a process that us as a contractor and us as a developer knew from product all the way backwards through process that we would be able to utilize and capitalize on. And that was the timeline. And from there it just kind of started taking off.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:30]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:30]:
So I remember last we spoke, I know you're an enthusiast, a student of entrepreneurship, generally founders other companies. What did you learn about why modular hadn't gotten to a level of scale that I think maybe some of those venture capitalists were thinking it should be at this point and where you felt, you know, you could do it differently, the understanding of the means and the methodology and all that. But like, why hasn't it gotten to where it needs to be yet?

Brad DeHays [00:16:02]:
Yeah. So I think whenever we do something, we look at, we try to get into things that are very high barrier to entry. And more so than study the successes, we try to study the failures and some of the reasons why businesses fail. So one of the things we looked at was, you know, there was Katera at that time, they had massive capital backing and they had a panelized concept which are called cassettes, which are doing a wall. Well, I mean, as a builder and commercial builder, some of the largest time delays are code related. It's code related and it's skilled trade related. Well, the issue with that is if you're doing cassettes, it does help your transportation. You can flat panel walls and send them out and you don't, you're not shipping any air.

Brad DeHays [00:16:54]:
But the issue is, is every connection, if you've done 100 projects commercial, you understand that every connection that's done in the field has to be inspected by a trades inspector for that municipality.

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:07]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:17:07]:
It also then has to be completed by a licensed subcontractor. So we knew that that in itself creates confusion. It works for hospitals where you have these very. Where you have these very expensive manifolds for gas piping and different kind of piping that happen behind a hospital bed.

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:27]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:17:28]:
Makes perfect sense. Some offices it works for. But when you talk about residential, you typically in residential plans examination and in residential code enforcement, you don't have the most skilled plans examiner and the most skilled inspectors. On every project. You may have a few, you may get lucky. But the most Part those highly skilled examiners and highly skilled code officials are doing, you know, universities and hospitals and large office and event space. The ones that were large groups of people are going to be. So we quickly said, all right, cassette is not the way to go for residential and that.

Brad DeHays [00:18:08]:
And then the other thing is, how fast can we get big? We didn't want to get too big too fast because the issue would be your interest will eat you. So we tried to do this without debt. Yeah, One way to do that is you go out and you bring in a ton of equity and you make promises that you may not be able to fulfill. We don't operate that way. So what we did is we put together a plan and we wanted to figure out how can we move in the same direction as the local community.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:38]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:18:39]:
And there was a lot of growth around central Ohio in industrial, and a lot of it is due to shipping. And that growth was in the outskirts, outside the 270 outer belt. So we did not. We looked at that and we were like, all right, it makes the most sense to move out there and to try to do jobs. But then we started looking at it, and we're like, we're just going to cannibalize the workers that are out there, and we're going to create logistical issues for transportation for workers that need jobs in the inner city to get out there. So then we started looking at, okay, how can we bring the jobs to the communities that need it the most? And that's when we started putting together. We're like, all right, we need to find locations. And I actually had someone that was in our office that was a professional athlete, a hockey player that was looking online and found a building, you know, that's at the time was 670,000 square feet on 27 acres.

Brad DeHays [00:19:36]:
And we're sitting in it right now. And when they found it, I was like, that's it. And we came in, we started negotiating it, and we ended up acquiring the property, and we started to put together a plan for. Okay, the next thing was, if we build this, how are we going to fill it with employees? So we then went and we started looking at, you know, new market tax credits for the right type of machinery. We started looking at, you know, any kind of employment incentives that are out there. And we put together a typical developer's package to. To do a job infrastructure piece. And the state of Ohio had a product that was coming out right at that time called the transformational Mixed Use Development, or TMUD for sure.

Brad DeHays [00:20:20]:
And we were the first winners of a magnet prize in that round, and that kicked everything off. City of Columbus was very helpful to us. The local port authority was helpful to us. And by doing that right at the right time, we were able to build something of a massive scale with very little debt. So we were able then to take the time to grow the workforce, and then we just had to create the process. So the local workers that were here, we were able to figure out how to get them upskilled quickly. And that's a whole nother story.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:54]:
Yeah, yeah. So not to lose sight of where we literally are. I mean, it's pretty amazing to me, having kind of walked through the whole hundreds of thousands of square feet of facility here. You know, right over there, we have raw materials coming in, and on the other side are finished units. And I think when people hear, you know, you have the capacity to build thousands of units a year, it's a little hard to conceptualize. But if you break it down and you think about the reality of what that means, which is a few houses, a few units a day, just take us through. Like, what is the process of what's happening from here all the way to hundreds of thousands of square feet over there? And how different is that from the traditional way of construction?

Brad DeHays [00:21:43]:
So in traditional construction, you have a. We use a Gantt chart to do our construction schedule. That's for construction and all the dependencies. Yeah. And basically, you extrapolate the timeline of the build, and you have your different trades that are stacked vertically and they overlap. Right. And you start to look at. They call that trade stacking.

Brad DeHays [00:22:09]:
And you look at these times in trade stacking, when the most people are on the project. And you know that timeline is lineal. Right. So what it is, is when we first started a construction project and traditional construction, you do site development. You have all your site development. Well, then the only people that can be on it are the people pushing the dirt.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:31]:
Yep.

Brad DeHays [00:22:32]:
Then once they have gone through and they've excavated and they've. And they've graded all the ground, you then can bring in your rough plumbing, your mains, all your sewage. You can bring in your storm sewers. You bring in your foot for your foundation, you start doing those pours again. Only those trades are on the job site. You're not trade stacking yet. Then you come in and you build your structural. You build your foundation, and then your structural exoskeleton.

Brad DeHays [00:22:58]:
Yeah, the exoskeleton could be wood, it could be steel, it could be concrete. Depends on the type and the height of the building. But the reality of that is, even that's very little trade stacking going on at that point, because it's big, heavy things that are dangerous to be around. So after the exoskeleton is up, you then do your exterior, you do your roof, then you dry it in, you do your windows, and then you can start doing a little bit more trade stacking. Your roughs come in well, just at that point is when you really can pack a job site. So you go from having five to 10 people on a mega site for an apartment complex to having 150 over a period of like, you know, so the first four, five months, you may only have, you know, five to 30, right? And then you go, boom, trade stack, 150, 200 people, people everywhere, cars, trucks, everywhere. When that happens, a lot of inefficiencies happen and, you know, theft happens and material destruction happens and waste. What we do in the factory is we take that timeline for development and we break it and we put them on top of each other.

Brad DeHays [00:24:17]:
So if you think about it, at the same time, as we break ground on the job site, we're already building the trade stacking, we're building the frames, we're rolling the steel, we're doing the wiring, we're doing the drywall. So by the time a unit leaves this room, and we're doing four units a day in this room, by the time it leaves this room, it is drywalled, taped, and mudded. Complete frame is built with plumbing in the floor and electrical in the wall. Completely insulated. Fire suppression already installed. Finished flooring already installed and ready to move out. And already quality control checked for all of those trades. So if you think about the amount of time it would take to do that on job site, we are already five months ahead by the time it leaves this room.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:06]:
Wow.

Brad DeHays [00:25:07]:
We're doing this at the same time that at the job site, the dozers are moving dirt. So the project that's on the line right now, they already are grading ground. They don't even have footers in the ground. By the time this finishes here, it starts getting stacked in October, the entire complex will be stacked in about eight to 12 weeks. It's a complete game changer from that dynamic.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:30]:
Yeah, it's interesting. It kind of reminds me. So in my entrepreneurial world, which is software development, there's this often cited trade off between speed, quality, and scope, where if you want to improve one of them, it often is at the expense of the other two. And what Is amazing about what you're doing is I feel like you just made the triangle bigger.

Brad DeHays [00:25:53]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:54]:
I mean you talked, we were talking before about even just the take the countertops and how because what you're doing at scale you can offer, you know, the high quality granite level materials relative to laminate that I mean it's all three of those things. It's a bigger triangle, I think.

Brad DeHays [00:26:13]:
I mean I've not thought of it that way, but I think you're onto something. So in typical construction, we talk about scope.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:22]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:26:22]:
We never talk about task. But if you're a person that has employed the actual worker and not just been a general contractor that employed subs, you know, we learned this from our self perform group methods and means of construction. You have to do daily tasks lists for every employee and it is an incredible undertaking every morning. So. But what happens at big job sites is you give the subcontractor, they have their job box meeting, they deal in scopes, but that subcontractor goes to their employees and they divvy out the tasks. Well, the thing we do here is we have taken in the entire process a scope. And we do not issue scopes. We issue tasks to individual workers.

Brad DeHays [00:27:11]:
That way they can perfect their tasks over and over and be successful. And the learning curve is significantly shorter.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:18]:
Right.

Brad DeHays [00:27:18]:
So what that means here in the factory is people, they don't have to see the big picture.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:24]:
Right.

Brad DeHays [00:27:24]:
They're going to witness it when it's done and everything, but they can actually master their task over and over again. That's why we have cut stations, we don't have field fabrication. There are a lot of things that we don't allow here that are commonplace on the job site and it's a complete game changer.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:43]:
Right.

Brad DeHays [00:27:46]:
On the other side with material consumption, you know, when I'm a developer and I have to buy material at a job site. So as a developer I've got my general partner investors, my limited partner investors all over top of me that we're trying to make sure we meet numbers.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:07]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:28:07]:
Everything below me as a developer is contract based. Right. So I have a AIA contract with the general contractor in this, you know, in our projects we own the general contracting company. So there's, there's all those fee based margin line items there. But under the general contractor you have subcontractors and there's line items there, there's margin there at every level. The subcontractors have margin on their labor, they have slippage on their labor, they have overhead and profit on their labor. All of those are percentages. And then you get to materials.

Brad DeHays [00:28:39]:
Then the material is either purchased through a retailer or a distributor who each of those levels are putting margin onto it. And the subcontractor puts margin on materials. And then below the distributor, the manufacturer who's selling it to the distributor is charging shipping freight, all of this that then gets doubled up from the distributor to the sub. Well, when you think about percentages, it's a great thing if you're compounding percentages, if you're the person getting paid, like in investing, you know, compounding is a great thing, but when you're the one paying, it's terrible. So what we found here is that we're able to purchase directly from manufacturers, have large quantities of goods sent to the factory and do institutional size purchases. And by doing that we can get it, we can warehouse it, we can ship it through our line. So like for countertops, we did 4900 slabs of countertops that we then, you know, put into our process. So we don't need to buy countertops now for three and a half years we actually can install solid surface countertops into affordable housing projects cheaper than we can do laminate.

Brad DeHays [00:29:52]:
We would never as being a spot buyer, as a developer, typically in traditional construction we would never even have the purview into those economics. But here we're able to push those economics to the line and then you know, all of those, those benefits are received by the contractor at sale.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:08]:
Yeah, I mean it's really like two, you mentioned commonplace like business concepts in other industries, vertical integration and factory line standardization supplied to housing.

Brad DeHays [00:30:20]:
Oh yeah, yeah. And I there, there's so many components of the process that really make that to where I can see where other people have struggled.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:33]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:30:34]:
And there's nothing is easy. Nothing is easy. But we knew we had to start, we had to start with something that was large enough. So when that urge came on to where we wanted to just be like, ah, you know what, we just want to rely on my, let's just get our finished carpenters in here and knock these units out. And then as you know, because that's easy. And that's the discussion as we brought in mid level managers. Well, why don't we just hire this trade set out? Why don't we do that? And I kept bringing everything back to say, because I've been doing that for 25 years and I know what the end result is. The end result is they can't scale as fast as we need to scale.

Brad DeHays [00:31:12]:
And if we Find a group that can, they're going to charge us for it. So what we had to do is go back constantly to the process and say, okay, how can we take that scope, break it up into tasks and how can we individualize that task to make a new to where a new employee can learn that in two hours? So we came up with the video based learning that now we rely on and we have, you know, hundreds. We have a full time videographer here that her entire job is to document process.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:42]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:31:42]:
And it is for our product, but that allows us to scale and that allows us to train significantly faster. Whereas in traditional construction we have to relearn yesterday's mistakes tomorrow. And it's just, it just happens. We always say we'll never do that again. And then the next year in a project we're like, oh, we did it again there. And it's, it's just, that's construction and it's not changing.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:06]:
So zooming out a bit, Connect Housing Blocks to me is one of the most ambitious companies in Ohio. How do you think about longer term? Like, what is your ambition? And like what do you want Connect Housing Blocks to be?

Brad DeHays [00:32:25]:
So we built Connect Housing Blocks to make a difference.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:28]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:32:29]:
I had someone ask us yesterday, you know, about, you know, why do you do affordable housing? Why do you do historic adaptive reuse, renovation? Why do you try to do some of these projects that are more difficult and it's push versus pull type entrepreneurialism.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:47]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:32:47]:
You know, developers by trade are typically the antagonists when they get into community meetings and things like that. Because as much as people say they want development when it's right next door to them, you'll quickly see that they'll change. And that's where the term NIMBYism, not in my backyard came from. We have always been pulled into development. So we have tried to produce a product that the municipality wants, the community wants, and for the most part we've been rewarded for that. And with this business is we first said, okay, if we're going to do this, we need to do this at a scale to where once we figure it out, the barrier to entry is so high that we don't have to worry about the next group coming in and trying to copy what we built. The market is massive and we can do this at such a high level, with a high level of precision and understanding that when other people see it, they're going to say, wow, I can see why that would work. But I can also see why we can't do it.

Brad DeHays [00:33:51]:
And I think we're at that point. So what we've done here and looking to scale this further is we created an original manufacturing facility with economics that we cannot duplicate. We hit at just the right time when there was ARPA funds that were out there and a lot of other Covid relief dollars and new programs that were out there that are simply not available right now. And we built a factory that was large enough in a community that needed it, with people who needed jobs, to where we have something that put us at a position to where we had time, we had staying power, we didn't have to recruit this massive amount of equity with these expectations of short term returns. We had great partners, great investors, great investors like the Ohio Fund that they understand that it's a growth story. And now we're at a point now where our production has got to a point of where we're making money. And that was a massive hurdle. The path to get there was really difficult.

Brad DeHays [00:34:56]:
But the best thing is we just scratched the surface on the production of this facility alone. This is one shift, it's a factory. I mean, there's a lot more we can do. But what we also did is we sourced all of our equipment globally. And a lot of this equipment was two year lead time. Custom. It takes two years to have it made, takes another six to eight months to commission it. And then you have to create all of your software to support it for your own product.

Brad DeHays [00:35:27]:
Massive undertaking. Now that we've done that, even when this factory for assembly is fully going and we're doing 10 to 12 modules a day out of here, our equipment is only operating at 40% capacity at that point. I mean, if we were operating at 70% capacity, we wouldn't even be able to talk right now. It'd be so loud.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:48]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:35:48]:
But the great thing about it is, you know, we can, we can prop up at least three assembly facilities in other states with the equipment that we have here. And we can bundle that prefabricated material and ship it out via rail and then we can assemble it in other states. And that's a game changer that allows us to scale at an incredible rate. And then once we're an assembly facility in another state, we can then make the decision based on that market if it can support another manufacturing facility.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:19]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:36:19]:
So that's our growth plans and we're moving forward in that direction.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:23]:
Yeah. So what, what do you feel the future of? So there's a few terms. Modular prefabrication, you know, construction generally. Where do you see this all going. And what is Connect's role within the ecosystem? Kind of writ large. So.

Brad DeHays [00:36:40]:
Right. I mean, last year, I think modular construction, and it's entirely. And this is manufactured homes, trailers, apartments, palletized walls for hospitals and schools. Modular, you know, bathrooms. Modular was only 7% of the United States construction industry. And I want to say that maybe it was eight years ago, it was 4%. Wow. So we're talking about, I mean, a growth market that is, it is.

Brad DeHays [00:37:10]:
It's incredible. We don't have to be the biggest player out there. We don't have to be the best player out there. We don't, you know, there's not these, you know, we can be a pioneer and operate like a settler, you know, and the statement used to be, you know, the pioneers get slaughtered and the settlers get fat. In an industry that can grow this fast, we understand the product and we understand the use of it and we have a demand for the product. So we're able to really grow and operate quickly. Be a big player in the space to create, help create best practices. Create best practices in the relationship of lenders and developers, insurance companies and manufacturers, transportation and logistics.

Brad DeHays [00:37:55]:
I mean, we're already in these communications at a large scale across the entire gamut. And, you know, I'm now going to be joining the Manufactured Housing Commission at a federal level and hopefully bringing, you know, systematic change into the industry. Connect housing blocks, I think is going to be a leader in that space. Doesn't have to be the leader. There's room for. There's room for a lot of us. And I think that there's a lot of great companies already in the space already operating at a high level.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:25]:
Yeah. So help make us tangible for a moment. You know, what have been your kind of favorite examples of all the units on the other side of this? And ultimately they get assembled and they become livable structures in the real world. What does it look like outside of the factory?

Brad DeHays [00:38:43]:
I think that whole, that matrix moment when people see what it is, I think is a key thing. When we did the station apartments at Trolley District and we put that out there and people were like, that's what it is. And the next thing they say, you didn't build that in a factory, you know, And I point to all the reasons why it performs better than traditional construction. You can really see the people that have been to the factory that have gone to see the finished product, their wheels really start turning.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:18]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:39:18]:
And, you know, we hoped that that would happen and we kind of knew that it was going to Happen. But until it happens, you still kind of are a little bit nervous. You know, it's like, it's like a. It's almost like the artwork side of it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:33]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:39:33]:
And when we did the station apartments, we knew that we wanted to do something dynamic enough that when people looked at it, they were going to say that's really attractive. And we could have done proof of concept with a smaller, less dynamic build. But we knew what we had. We're one of the only players in the space that can do large scale stacked, multi story apartment complexes. We have a fire rated structure. We can go up to 11 stories tall. We can be the top 11 stories of a 17 story building. We can go on top of a parking garage.

Brad DeHays [00:40:09]:
Like there's a dynamics to this that we've just scratched the surface. And there are a lot of players in the single family home space. We can do that too. I'm not saying that that's easy. What I'm saying is we did the most difficult type of build first.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:26]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:40:26]:
And we created a manufacturing line for it. So we're going to create high volume in this space, get as much product out there to help the communities. I mean, from a disaster relief standpoint, we can literally put disaster relief units out there that are a higher quality than what families are typical typically living in, in those situations. And then we can take them back and put them into an apartment complex. So temporary housing does not need to be discarded. Temporary housing can become permanent housing in a use that it was meant for. And I think that that's when you're talking about labor shortages. It is not wasting any labor in the building space because we can't afford it.

Brad DeHays [00:41:08]:
Like the instability of the supply demand curve right now. We keep putting more and more money out, which we need. We keep trying to, you know, regulate and make zoning more attainable, which we need. We try to reduce financing costs, which we need. We try to provide, you know, rent vouchers, which we need. But all that does is create more demand, which I am for.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:34]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:41:35]:
The problem is, is the issue that we've always had back to when we had low interest rates. The bottleneck was can we build it, can we build that fast? And we can't. And zoning is a part of it. But the reality is we don't have the labor pool. So the space that we think that us as a company, we want to be a volume shooter. We want to be a volume shooter in mass produced, high quality housing for stacked apartment complexes. But that doesn't have to be the Initial use, the emergency housing component, fema, emergency relief, hud, some of their components. We want to be a company that can help facilitate rapid deployment of housing for people in need, but then can also convert it into permanent housing.

Brad DeHays [00:42:21]:
I think that's a space where we're going to find some traction.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:23]:
Yeah. I mean that's incredible. I definitely want to revisit the labor topic, but I want to pull on the artistic thread actually for a moment because it almost seems a little trivial and narrow. But I would imagine. I don't know this for sure, but I would imagine some of the pushback you might get on modular generally is like design aesthetic. It's not going to look good, but there is an intentionality around like aesthetic and quality. And I think it would probably surprise a lot of people. But I'm just curious like your philosophy on design and aesthetic and like finish.

Brad DeHays [00:43:01]:
So Connect Real Estate is our development company. We're one of the largest adaptive reuse historic developers in this region. Definitely in the state. But we are massive proponents of architectural integrity. And you know, there's differing opinions when you're a historian or a historical developer. A lot of true historians that I know look for juxtaposition. If I own a truly historic building and it is of the times when it was developed and that could be any times, we always look back at like turn of the century real estate as, you know, all the big spires and the columns and or brick cornices or stone cornices. But the reality is if I'm doing a new build apartment complex across the street from my historic building, I want that new build apartment complex to look new.

Brad DeHays [00:44:01]:
Yeah. I want it to juxtapose against my historic building because it'll draw more attention to my historic building if I go to try to copy the brick tone or the brick features, it's a little bit of a pretender and you know, it's too expensive to ever try to get to that level of integrity, you know, that we had back, you know, when we had significant amount of skilled masons that worked especially and here in Ohio. So what we found is how can we create aesthetics and architectural integrity in our modular to where it guarantees that it's not this flush face building with flush hallways. And the integrity doesn't just have to be on the outside. How can we program the integrity for the interior? So we did first on the outside is we created different depths and how those communicate between the units. It takes multiple. We have small modulars that are one apartment per module.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:58]:
Yep.

Brad DeHays [00:44:58]:
We also have large Scale floor plans that are multiple modulars to make apartments. Well on the outside those are different depths, they align on the inside in the hallway. So we have a straight hallway, but on the outside you create opportunities for decks and different protrusions that then allow you to take some of these typical artists architectural features and put them onto apartment complex where you essentially could do anything. You can do brick hardiebacker, you can do lap siding, you could do vinyl, you could do board and batten. So all these different things we do on our buildings on the inside we programmed all of our mechanicals to go to the hallway and we studied and we took photography of five star hotel hallways. And we said how can we make this look to where it's not this nondescript bland hallway where you look down and it's like doors and wall. And we did soffits and we did chases vertically that bring the mechanicals up and down in areas to where you create this in and out feature that it makes it look like a hotel, but it's by design and it's by necessity. So we're pretty, we're very proud of how that laid out.

Brad DeHays [00:46:11]:
It took a lot of time, but I think it's working out well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:13]:
Yeah, that's awesome. So how do you guys think about the labor component of all of this?

Brad DeHays [00:46:22]:
So I think in general we have had no shortage of applicants.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:30]:
Yep.

Brad DeHays [00:46:30]:
So we have 160 full time employees here. Now we are building out our second shift which is, you know, we run 4 tens Monday through Thursday and then we have overlap on Thursday and our second shift is during the week as we're building out. That's Thursday through Sunday. We then can do a second shift during the day, we can do a third shift at night. This thing is running seven days a week. We are hiring six to eight people a week.

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:00]:
Wow.

Brad DeHays [00:47:01]:
It's incredible. But the one thing though is when we're a second chance employer and we're hiring people that some have never had a job before and almost all of them have not been in the construction industry, you're going to have issues with regards to accountability of schedule showing up. So we focused our orientation process throughout time here to, you know, for the first 90 days. Yep, it's very strict. And because we're running a manufacturing facility, people have to be here, people have to learn how to be safe. So there's a huge amount of attrition in that first 90 days. But once people are at 90 days, they go from a yellow hard hat to a white hard hat and they get a raise and the stickiness after that is fantastic. So we're going to continue to onboard people, continue to train them.

Brad DeHays [00:47:53]:
We don't use the word teach here because really we train, we put tool in hand within two hours once people get here. And we're very satisfied with that. In the general construction industry. I can talk about that because we still own a construction company.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:08]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:48:10]:
The change that we've seen in the last 10 years in labor, not just to skilled trades, but general labor, has been massive. So 10 years ago, we could see this shift in skilled trades to where there were less and less workers available. And your master electricians, master plumbers, master carpenters, H vac techs, they were aging 45 to 55 years old. There's a lot of documented, you know, statistics on this that there's. This isn't a feeling, this is actual facts that that labor pool was not backfilling. So what we found was, you know, when I first started my construction company 25 years ago, cigarettes were our biggest problem. Cigarettes were our biggest problem. And you know, you would have smoke breaks, you would have guys that would be bringing their cigarettes into the job site.

Brad DeHays [00:49:05]:
They'd have a tool in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and you'd have to shut that down.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:09]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:49:10]:
You know, now honestly, we look at it and we're like that. Other than the health issues, that wasn't that bad. Because now the iPhone, we cannot get the phone out of the job site. And if you went to one of my job sites right now, and I've talked to other large scale general contractors, they have even employed scramblers for job sites to try to scramble cell phone signals. It's that bad. The reason why is people are addicted and the subcontractors are having difficult time filling the roles under them. So I can't, as a general contractor, one of my employees, which would be a superintendent or a project manager, they can't go out and tell a subs employees put the phones away or get off the job site because that sub, that employee will just quit. Get a job site.

Brad DeHays [00:50:00]:
Yeah. So I literally can walk up, go to a drive up to a job site. Five to seven years ago, you could see people sliding their phones in their pockets.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:08]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:50:09]:
Now they don't care. They just keep it out. I literally step over people in hallways and go into units and people are watching videos. They're not my employee, but I know that I'm paying for them. I'm paying for them at the GC level. I'm paying for Them at the developer and the limited partner level. It's painful to watch. What we used to be able to do is your skilled trades.

Brad DeHays [00:50:30]:
Ten years ago, you would typically have the Latino workforce that would be your drywallers and your painters and your masons and your landscapers and your roofers. Now though, in those communities would show up and they would cook their own lunch on the job site. They would have their communities. They would work really hard. You wouldn't see cell phones. They would kind of keep amongst themselves. And now they've been completely Americanized, which isn't a bad thing. But for work, it's the same habits that we have in other trades.

Brad DeHays [00:51:09]:
So now you show up and they're on their phone. They're on their phone, they're not paying attention, they're not getting work done. And it really is just kind of reciprocated through the entire workforce. The best tool we have in this factory is a locker. It's a locker.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:25]:
No phones.

Brad DeHays [00:51:26]:
No phones. Phones and lockers. We have machinery and equipment around anywhere through here that if you're not paying attention, it will hurt you. So when people start, cell phones are in the locker. And we've had to terminate a lot of employees for that. But now culture is set, and that's the expectation. And what it does is people have their eyes up, they talk, they communicate. Now, rapport amongst workers is better here than it is at our job sites.

Brad DeHays [00:51:52]:
And I really like it. I like where it's going.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:54]:
Yeah, yeah. How do you think about the culture of connect and what is that to you?

Brad DeHays [00:52:01]:
Culture starts at the top. And one of the things where every time you start something new or impose change, that destabilizes. So one of the big things that we've always held true is I played sports and, you know, establishing discipline and outwardly speaking about it is a really important thing. We actually don't use the word team out here and we don't use the word teacher. And the reason why is when we start a new company, a team is only as effective as the individual handling his tasks. So the word team has to be earned over time. So what we did here is we implemented task level jobs and we reward people for doing that. We don't allow people to group.

Brad DeHays [00:52:52]:
We have something called walking in tandem, which are two people walking through the facility. We don't allow that. We don't allow it. You know, it's part of orientation. We have gray hats that are employees that have been promoted here into supervisor roles, that their sole job is being a People multiplier. Being a people multiplier is just breaking up groups of people. So if you ever drive by like a union job out in the field, which you know it's necessary but they, you know, they have a lot of people grouped up doing a task. Well, here in the factory everyone has a task.

Brad DeHays [00:53:27]:
If they don't, they should be in training. And so we quickly break up clusters of people. Our gray hats do and they break up people walking in tandem. Two people don't have to go throw something away. But that lowest level of accountability creates a sense of purpose.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:47]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:53:47]:
That sense of purpose then allows people to thrive in their role and see success more. So it keeps them from getting pulled away. So you know, that has established. It took a while to establish that culture. But once, once the culture is established and people are financially and through respect rewarded for it, it takes on itself. So now we're at a spot here to where we have momentum.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:12]:
Yep.

Brad DeHays [00:54:13]:
We've had it for quite some time. And as we bring new people in, it self governs we still have to check up on it. You know, it's kind of, we always say like, it's like, you know, I coach kids, sports. It's like get back in line, get back in line, get back in line. If we stop looking at the line, chaos.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:29]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:54:30]:
So everybody, our top level leaders, the black hats out here, they monitor our processes for breaks and they monitor walking in tandem. It's not just on the lower level managers and you know, everyone takes a sense of pride in it and it's going very well and it's easier to do here than it is at a job site.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:50]:
Well, I know you mentioned none of this is easy. Perhaps, you know, it's all difficult. I'm curious when you reflect on the journey thus far. I know it's been kind of an iterative improvement over time. The process just everything and I'm sure it will continue to be. But like what, what sticks out to you as like the greatest earned wisdom from connect housing blocks? You know, perhaps relative to all the work you've done prior.

Brad DeHays [00:55:15]:
I think there's, I think there's two, I think there's two, there's two instances that really kind of tie that together.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:20]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:55:21]:
So on the worker side.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:22]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:55:22]:
We recently did an orientation video that I only participated in for a few like snippets of, of coverage. But the video group went through and they interviewed our employees.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:36]:
Yep.

Brad DeHays [00:55:37]:
And the stories of the employees is something that it was, it's amazing, honestly. Like I can't Even explain, like, how proud I am of everybody just to have that kind of change. And it's all based on structure and opportunity. I preached when we first start this, we give to charity, but this is not a charity. You know, this is.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:00]:
This is.

Brad DeHays [00:56:00]:
We give opportunity here. As a business, we provide to charity, but in our business, we're not a charity. So that structure, what it's done with a lot of our workers who either haven't had jobs or had addiction issues or had, you know, been formerly incarcerated. Yeah, they. They have embraced that structure and they've taken it into their personal lives and they told some of the stories and. And honestly, like, it's a borderline of, like, of tearing up and being proud. And, you know, the fact that a lot of those changes occurred within these walls, but it's not something that I did directly. It's something that other people here did to help them.

Brad DeHays [00:56:44]:
It's a complete game changer. And it's happening every day. And then you take the investor side, when we first saw this, we've been doing difficult projects as a development company for over 20 years, and we're known for doing really difficult urban infill projects. And I used to always hear, like, you know, other developers that are friends of mine that are very successful, they would say, why do you do that? And, oh, Brad'll do it. Just call Brad. And, you know, you always wonder if you're the guy running into the fire and they know that, hey, you're gonna get burnt. And we have always selected to get pulled into developments, and we figured them out. And when we went to do this, there were a lot of people in the industry that said, okay, good luck.

Brad DeHays [00:57:33]:
A lot of people have failed. And honestly, we were cautiously optimistic because we knew. And other people have failed. We absolutely could fail. But what we had is we had a group of investors. I always start with my money, and I always started investing. And, you know, when you've had some success, it gets more and more difficult to push your chips back in. Yeah, but what we did is we had the support of the government, we had state and local support, and we knew that through some of these programs that they had faith in us and they stepped up big time.

Brad DeHays [00:58:06]:
Then we had investors that I put my money up first, and. But before I even put mine up, I had all of our core investors said, brad, we're in. When you're ready, we're in. That's all I needed. I didn't take their money at that time because I didn't want any of them to be that much at risk because we didn't know what we didn't know. So I started it and once I got traction and I was like, okay, I can see it, I can see the full path, I put together some funding pools and they went like that. And that was when there was maybe one or two modulars on the whole floor. But we had a prototype and we had machinery coming in and we had a process.

Brad DeHays [00:58:44]:
And when that happened, I was so proud that investors were like, hey, we're willing to put capital towards this. We're willing to back you up. And then from then, it's just been more and more. As we had these victories, more people came in and now we're seeing interest, you know, on a broader scale. And I think, like, it's just, it's that waterfall effect. But those things at the very top level, on the employee side, impact and on the investor side and the faith they've had in us, that's been something that, that's really allowed us to kind of carry that torch forward. And it's been through our entire company. Like all of our investors, all of our employees of the development side, they're excited and we're getting top level talent coming over from other companies because they see it and recognize it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:31]:
Yeah, that's powerful.

Brad DeHays [00:59:32]:
Yeah. Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:34]:
So with an eye towards the future, what are you most excited about?

Brad DeHays [00:59:38]:
I think it's more of we don't know what we don't know.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:41]:
Yeah, you still don't know what you don't know.

Brad DeHays [00:59:43]:
I'm a little bit. There's nerves associated with this. So what we've done is we're now at a point, we're here where I can say that this has been a success.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:54]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [00:59:55]:
How do we scale it? How do we grow? We have been focused on how can we do that without betting the farm on what we have. Every time we go to grow for more, we have to trade something back in. And so it's. So the export side of this business we did around last year to start planning for our next assembly facility and in the next. We have term sheets out for two locations right now. And we have. But we have interest from the government on maybe some different paths. So we're looking at those.

Brad DeHays [01:00:30]:
And I can really see that, you know, some of the, our groups that have invested with us, they want to see us go, just go start running. So we're going to have to start doing things that are more rapid than maybe I would like to do. Typically, if we were doing it Just like, hey, make profit, reinvest the profit as retained earnings and just go. But it's exciting because the new markets, the pull into those markets, and the fact that we understand our product better than anybody is I think it gives us just enough backbone to be able to do it. And I've never wanted to fall on our face, but I feel like there's enough people that are running with us to where, you know, we've got enough rope. So over the next couple years, we know we're going to have at least two assembly facilities that we'll be building out. Can we do three? I think that we want to have the third one located and then see how we can really step into, you know, assisting, like, some of these emergencies and housing issues at a federal level. But again, we want pulled into markets, so there is a little bit of wait and see on that side of it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:44]:
Yeah, well, we've obviously covered a lot of ground here. I'm curious, as you just kind of reflect on your whole journey, if you feel there's something particularly important that we haven't talked about that, that you want to bring up.

Brad DeHays [01:01:58]:
You know, I think being an entrepreneur, as you know, you've done. You've done so many of these, you always trade in a little bit of yourself every time you're doing something new. We have, in total, our company is like 380 employees and, you know, multiple businesses that are vertically integrated, all of them based in real estate somehow.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:20]:
Yep.

Brad DeHays [01:02:21]:
You know, every time that we've done this, I have. I have. I have five children, obviously, and a wife that lets me, you know, really check back in constantly into these new risks and new projects. And I think that without that stability, it would be really difficult because you quickly lose yourself. You know, you get into a problem, you try to solve it, you lose yourself. You have to have people constantly pull you back in. My wife learned a long time ago that the best way to make sure that happens is to make me head coach on teams for our kids and then, you know, allowing me to. When I say I have to go do this on a weekend, you know, there's a lot of times here in this business to where it kind of makes me think of, you know, the.

Brad DeHays [01:03:09]:
I grew up with the Dunkin Donuts commercial of the guy waking up and saying, I've gotta go make the donuts. I've gotta go make the donuts. The only time to really perfect and improve on this line is when it's not running.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:22]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [01:03:22]:
You know, so we come in, and my Core group of leaders like, you know, Bradley Annan has been here since the beginning. A gentleman named Matt Shanke has been here, an engineer, since the beginning. Scott Humphreys, a really close friend of mine, as our chief operating officer. We brought him in as soon as we got large enough to where we could scale. And it's been a lot of weekends of coming in here and modifying process. And that has been, you know, one of the things that I always look back to, honestly, just being on this side of the factory.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:53]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [01:03:53]:
We started out on this side of the factory in this room in an office below us, and the rest of the building was empty.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:01]:
Wow.

Brad DeHays [01:04:02]:
And it was. Then it was one machine, and then it was two, and now it's five, and then it's all the tables. And then we've changed this line three times. Now it's all vertical instead of horizontal and all these gantry cranes, and it's just. But beyond this room, it's prefab. It's raw goods fabrication. It's 120 modulars inside the finish room. And then it's all of our corporate offices on the other side of that of 20,000 square feet, and then it's the 180 modulars that are finished out in the parking lot in the logistics side of the business, with our big rig that's out there and all of our trailers.

Brad DeHays [01:04:43]:
I think looking at the stepping stones of this process, I think trading in a lot of that private time to make it happen started at the family, went through my friends.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:56]:
Yeah.

Brad DeHays [01:04:57]:
Came here into this side of the building and then grew. And it's just. I'm so happy to see it rolling every day, regardless if I'm here or not.

Jeffrey Stern [01:05:06]:
I appreciate you sharing that. It's. It's incredibly exciting. I just want to thank you for taking the time, sharing more about your journey here. It's. I mean, it's hard not to be super excited about it, just, like, where it's happening.

Brad DeHays [01:05:21]:
So I appreciate it. Thank you for taking an interest. I mean, you know, the Ohio Fund has been a great partner to us, and, you know, we look at their expertise and experience, and I think, you know, getting recognition for what we've done, we don't. We did a lot of this, like, inside of a vacuum for a long time, mainly because we didn't know. We thought we knew what we had, but we didn't know if it was worthwhile to really go out there and call attention to it because we've seen so many other groups call attention to themselves really early in the process. And when the floodgates are open, you've got to be ready to hit the surge to hit you. And I think we're at a point now where with some of the local recognition that we've had and the federal recognition that we've had, we're able to take on that surge and we can point to things. So it's a good spot to be in.

Brad DeHays [01:06:11]:
And I think the next couple years is going to be. It's going to be more and more and we're just going to focus on navigating it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:18]:
Yep, I'm looking forward to it.

Brad DeHays [01:06:20]:
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:21]:
If people had anything they wanted to follow up with to learn more, where on the interwebs are you pointing them to?

Brad DeHays [01:06:28]:
So I think we now have so Connect Real Estate. They've been pushing out a lot through social media, Instagram and LinkedIn and those. So Connect Real Estate is our company on the development side. And then Connect Housing Blocks. We do have a website, Connect Housing Blocks. I think they may have some social media. We try not to put a lot out there that way, primarily just because, you know, we're still growing and, you know, and then we're kind of, you know, bombarded a little bit with interest, which we appreciate. But there's so many hours in a day.

Brad DeHays [01:07:02]:
But I think there's plenty of information out there to learn more and there's information on, you know, employment opportunities, things like that. And we want to, you know, really funnel talent our way. So that's best way. That's where you can find us. Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:16]:
Perfect. Well, thank you again.

Brad DeHays [01:07:17]:
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:19]:
Thank you for tuning in to the Ohio Fund Report. If you enjoyed this podcast, we'd love for you to leave a review on your favorite platform and subscribe to stay updated on all future episodes. You can subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or directly on our website at TheOhioFund.com the information shared on this podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The views and opinions expressed by our guests are solely their own and do not necessarily represent those of the Ohio Fund. A guest's participation in this podcast does not imply an endorsement or an investment recommendation by the Ohio Fund. This podcast may include conversations with leadership of a company in which the Ohio Fund or its affiliated funds have an investment and as such, financial interest in the success of this company. And there may be a conflict of interest in presenting information about the company and its performance.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:23]:
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