Unity Homes

Thank you Laura for this great review! We are delighted that you are enjoying your Unity Home and appreciate your continued support of, and interest in, Unity.

We're so glad you're enjoying your lovely home and thanks for sharing your experience.

At Unity Homes, we take the concerns of our clients seriously. In her negative review of Unity, our client Eileen Udry suggests that the issues she experienced on her project were the result of Unity being a young company, and “not ready for prime time.” However, Unity has built more than forty homes in the past four years, and our clients are generally very pleased with the process and the result.
At Unity, we know that issues and challenges are always going to arise in the construction of high-performance homes. When they do, the most important questions for us are “How effectively are we responding to these issues?” And, “Are we improving our process by learning from our mistakes?”

Eileen mentions that she was told that we model our homes in 3D, but that the 3D modeling was not available to her. The fact is, every Unity Home is modeled in 3D, because the information from the 3D model drives the computer-controlled cutting equipment in our shop. However, the 3D model that we created for this project was apparently not shared with Eileen, or it was not what she was expecting. The 3D model can be used to understand the basic massing of the house, but it does not easily lend itself to a virtual 3D walk-through. Photo-realistic virtual 3D walk-throughs are coming—for Unity and for other builders—but they are currently too expensive to be included in Unity’s standard process. We are now making sure that our clients have a clear understanding of the 3D modeling that we do, prior to their signing a contract.

Eileen’s second point relates to the timeframe for construction. Unity has ambitious goals for reducing the time required to build a new home, and our off-site process generally makes for significantly faster construction compared to building a home entirely on site. But the “30 days” that Eileen references from our website is more aspirational than actual: “We have the potential...to build homes in 30 days that last 300 years.” Many factors affect the construction schedule, including certain tasks like permitting that are outside of our control. On average, our homes require 8 to 10 weeks to finish, after our crew has assembled the shell of the home on site. For most of our clients, the predictability that we can provide in terms of cost and quality is a greater incentive than a compressed construction schedule.

The third point that Eileen raises centers on the temperature and comfort within the home. At Unity, we strive to make each of our homes as comfortable as possible, and in fact, we promote comfort as being a primary benefit of our homes. However, in the Udry’s house, we made two mistakes that resulted in discomfort for Eileen and her husband: we allowed the design to include too much window area facing south, and we did not fully take into account how the linear layout of the house would affect the mechanical systems. The extensive windows resulted in the home occasionally being too warm during the winter when the angle of the sun was below the roof overhang. The linear design resulted in the home’s ventilation system being slightly undersized, and a room at the far end of the house being under-conditioned.

So how did we respond? When the significance of these issues became apparent, we flew two representatives (the project manager and our in-house energy specialist) out to the job site. Our team confirmed the issues and discussed possible solutions with the homeowners. We proposed that we add shades to address the overheating issue, increase the size and associated ductwork of the ventilation system to handle the loads, and add an additional mini-split heating/cooling zone that would condition the portion of the home furthest from the units that were originally installed. And we offered to make these changes free of charge.

Ultimately, Eileen and her husband decided to decline our offer, and instead opted to retain the final payment on their contract, which they had been holding pending resolution of the issues.

Because we at Unity are committed to standing behind our work, on this project we would have preferred to have the opportunity to “make it right” through the shading and changes to the HVAC system. However, we believe that the final resolution, while not fully satisfactory to either the clients or to us, was fair and equitable.

At Unity Homes, our work is guided by 12 principles. Principle #10 is “we own the problems we see.” Our response to Eileen and her husband exemplified our commitment to this principle. Principle #8 states that “unless proven otherwise, we assume that people are good; only systems are at fault.” Knowing that these clients and our team of hardworking professionals are good people led us to evaluate the breakdown in our systems that resulted in the mistakes and the unfavorable review.

The path to a Better Way to Build is not without bumps, and as we see it, the path has no end—there will always be room for improvement. We learned expensive but important lessons on this project. Unity Homes is stronger for it because the knowledge and experience that we gained is making all of our projects better.