Build Ahead
Scaling Pre-Approved Plans for Affordable Housing: Offsite Methods & Demand Aggregation
Blog | Feb 19, 2026
Vermont’s Homes for All Phase 3 program shows how state pre-approved home design catalogs can evolve to support offsite construction. It pairs traditional construction documents with pod-and-panel alternatives for the same homes. The Center for Offsite Construction helped inform the Phase 3 RFP in July, then is brainstorming with The Pew Charitable Trusts to translate Vermont’s progress into portable model legislative language for other states. We welcome other to help shape this practical path for reducing affordable housing costs by enabling repeatable pod-and-panel catalogs, collecting “apples-to-apples” cost data, and incentivizing adoption at scale.
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What's Critically Missing in the Road to Housing Act
Blog | Feb 16, 2026
The Center for Offsite Construction supports the ROAD to Housing Act’s intent to treat housing supply as urgent national infrastructure, and applauds its push toward repeatable, scalable delivery through offsite production, innovation grants, and pre-reviewed pathways. But the bill risks recreating fragmented, program-by-program pilots that still force manufacturers and builders into bespoke coordination—slowing adoption and blocking interoperability—because it implicitly gestures toward Configure-to-Order (CTO) without naming or building the market infrastructure CTO requires. To make the Act’s ambition cohere, Congress should explicitly fund CTO-enabling infrastructure: accelerate ANSI-accredited interface standards, pull conforming products through federal procurement first to create reliable demand and performance data, then use incentives to open those catalogs and interfaces to private builders at scale.
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The CfOC's Lessons from Advancing PreFab 2026
Blog | Feb 16, 2026
Fresh off Advancing PreFab 2026, Jason Van Nest sat down with Senior Research Fellow Connor Bailey to unpack what he heard while chairing the conference’s Business Strategy track... what executives are finally willing to admit, and what they’re still avoiding. Clearly, a growing share of the industry is actively looking past Engineer-to-Order pain management toward Configure-to-Order market logic, even if the catalogs, contracts, and installation discipline aren’t fully there yet. If 2025 was about tools and workflows, 2026 sounded like a scramble for a new business model, and the interview captures the tells.
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CfOC at Advancing Prefabrication 2026
Blog | Feb 01, 2026
The Center for Offsite Construction (CfOC) is pleased to announce that its Executive Director, Jason Van Nest, will serve as Track Chair for Track Seven: Business Strategy at Advancing Prefabrication 2026, taking place February 2–5 in Dallas, Texas. Jason will chair the Business Strategy track during the main conference days on Tuesday, February 3 and Wednesday, February 4.
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The Missing Infrastructure Behind Panelized Offsite Construction
Blog | Dec 29, 2025
The shared rules panelized offsite construction still needs” are the focus of a new CfOC whitepaper exploring open-source standards for panel-to-panel and panel-to-structure interfaces. The post argues that repeated project-by-project redesign of common panel joining conditions is slowing coordination, limiting interoperability, and holding the industry back from a more organized Configure-to-Order marketplace. It also explains that the whitepaper is an evolving draft that the CfOC plans to update as it recruits a new consensus committee, gathers industry input, and raises support for the effort.
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Steve DeWitt Named Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Offsite Construction (2025–2026)
Blog | Dec 12, 2025
The Center for Offsite Construction has named Steve DeWitt a Senior Research Fellow for 2025–2026, recognizing his leadership in rules-based design and building configurators that translate theory into working software for offsite construction. As owner of Custom Building Configurators and a co-author of the CfOC’s Configurator File Type whitepaper, Steve will contribute applied research defining open rule schemas, reference workflows, and interoperable configurator infrastructure that supports Configure-to-Order delivery. His work will help advance the CfOC’s Research Roadmap by bridging BIM and VDC environments with productized, manufacturing-informed systems that enable scalable, repeatable building.
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A Milestone in the Making of CfOC-ICC-1220: Seating the Consensus Committee
Blog | Nov 26, 2025
The CfOC has completed the next major step in developing the CfOC-ICC-1220 Modular Interface Standard by seating a carefully selected, fully balanced Consensus Committee. After a month of independent review and deliberation, the Advisory Committee unanimously chose members whose collective wisdom, diverse experience, and broad representation will guide the creation of a fair, open, and industry-shaping standard. This milestone marks the transition from preparing the team to beginning the technical work that will strengthen the offsite construction ecosystem nationwide.
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Advisory Board Votes Unanimously to Launch the Next Phase of CfOC-ICC-1220
The CfOC Advisory Board has unanimously approved launching the next phase of the CfOC-ICC-1220 Modular Interface Standard, marking a significant milestone in the organization’s growth as an ANSI-accredited standards body. This vote authorizes the formation of an Advisory Committee that will immediately begin selecting the most qualified experts to serve on the forthcoming Consensus Committee, accelerating the technical work needed to build a national CTO marketplace. With unprecedented momentum and its most productive quarter to date, the CfOC is now actively raising funds to sustain this fast-moving standards effort.
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