Dive Brief:

• Tennessee-based manufactured housing maker Clayton Homes has set up a new transportation division that will deliver homes from its manufacturing plants to retail home centers.

• With the new division, Clayton Home Transport, the company is introducing a fleet of trucks to deliver the homes. The company said its drivers will receive several weeks of training in the fabrication facility.

• The new division and fleet was launched Dec. 8, 2016, at the company’s manufacturing facility in Andersonville, TN. The company has 35 plants and 320 retail home centers in the U.S.

Dive Insight:

Clayton, a subsidiary business of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, has been building up its manufactured housing business. In April, it snapped up River Birch Homes, a manufactured housing company in Hackleburg, AL.

Clayton is the known market leader in manufactured housing, taking a 45% share of sales in 2014, according to The Wall Street Journal, but has previously faced allegations of predatory lending practices.

More recently, the company has been looking to expand its site-built business, acquiring Summit Custom Homes, Kansas City, MO’s largest homebuilder, last year.

Off-site construction methods are slowly gaining traction elsewhere in the residential market, as they give builders greater control over quality for ultra-energy-efficient projects and reduce exposure to typical job site variables like weather and other damage. Streamlining production also lowers costs.

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