Homebuilder NileBuilt Corp. may be in the right industry at the right time by offering homes resistant to fires, a key selling point following the disasters in the Los Angeles area in January.
Now the Irvine-based startup, led by long-time builder Scott Long, is seeking to convince investors about the soundness of the company’s products and its future.
The homes will be made of concrete and composite and are designed to help resist the effects of fires and major water damage. The composite is similar to the materials now used to build cars and airplanes.
The company, which began in 2019, has been making a push for more financing to ramp up production to meet demand, though it hasn’t recorded revenue yet. The company has been aiming to raise up to $125 million in a market that’s likely to be filled with developers of environmentally sound homes.
“How much we have raised has to be kept private, but I can tell you we are making great progress with the state, accredited and institutional investors,” NileBuilt co-founder and Chief Executive Long told the Business Journal on Feb. 23.
The company said it’s introduced non-combustible, net-zero and disaster-resilient homes to the Southern California market.
California State Support for Construction
NileBuilt has attracted assistance from California state officials.
“The state is assisting NileBuilt with site selection for a pre-production facility,” said Dustin McDonald, a regional business development specialist in Governor Gavin Newsom’s office.
California is also helping the company “engage the state’s suite of incentives” to promote businesses, McDonald told the Business Journal on Feb. 25.
“Nilebuilt is well-positioned to deploy operations more broadly in California beyond their current base in OC,” McDonald said. “They are the only company in the state offering net zero, non-combustible homes, providing communities and homebuyers energy-independent residential construction options that will not be destroyed in a fire for the first time ever.”
NileBuilt plans to build a demonstration Gen-2 home in the Nellie Gail Ranch community in Laguna Hills, starting at the end of March.
Long said the core management team is made up of around 15 people, including architects and engineers.
Altadena, Palisades, Malibu
The Gen-2 homes the company will be marketing are part of an evolution using composite and concrete, based on its construction methods.
Long previously co-founded two Iowa-based companies that focused on manufacturing concrete walls systems. One of those companies, Zero Energy Systems, began in 2009 and was forced into bankruptcy in 2018. Long filed a countersuit against a bank that forced the bankruptcy; after five years of litigation, Long eventually lost.
“A rotten ending, but it helped us create NileBuilt and keep the technology and opportunity moving forward,” Long told the Business Journal. “Iowa’s loss, California’s gain.”
He listed Altadena-Pasadena, Palisades and Malibu as areas of possible interest for the company’s homes.
The homes will be made of 70% fiber composite and 30% concrete.
They will range in size from 1,200 square feet to 5,200 square feet, with the “sweet spot” around 2,500 square feet to 3,500 square feet.
The typical home will have two to four bedrooms, with a minimum of two bathrooms.
The NileBuilt homes will range in price from $750,000 to help get people into home ownership and go up to $6 million.
The company’s name is a kind of allusion to Africa’s Nile River, the world’s longest river.
“Nile was really intended to be showing kind of strong-flowing steady consistent power,” Long said.
