Next month, the Center for Offsite Construction will present Handshake to the American College of Real Estate Lawyers (ACREL) Construction Law Committee at ACREL’s 2026 Mid-Year Meeting in Huntington Beach, California (March 26–29, 2026, Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach).

For us, this is a rare and valuable forum: an opportunity to put the paper’s core question in front of 30–50 of the country’s most experienced construction and real estate lawyers, and to pressure-test the argument with the people who understand the industry’s contractual fault lines best.

At our request, the Construction Law Committee leadership has also organized a pre-meeting planning session with several of our Senior Research Fellows to review an early draft and advise on audience, framing, and practical legal considerations.

Handshake acts in two forms. 

• It is the CfOC’s thesis and research paper for how US offsite construction methods will finally scale... by adopting Configure-to-Order business models.
• It also acts as a call for collaborators to help draft a new generation of standard forms of agreement that better fit industrialized, offsite delivery.

These projects depend increasingly on catalogs of products, repeatable configurations, and supply-chain commitments that look more like product transactions than bespoke jobsite improvisation. The Uniform Commercial Code offers deeper precedent for that product logic, and we believe it can become a practical legal utensil for unlocking more efficient Configure-to-Order pathways in offsite construction.