During the housing boom, builders sought ways to construct houses as quickly as possible. That was all right with Keith Dietzen, chief executive of Boulder’s Keymark Enterprises LLC.
When it comes to home-building, “we speed up the cycle time,” said Dietzen, who started Keymark, which produces prefabricated framing materials using proprietary design software, in 1975.
But over the past couple of years, the speed that Dietzen’s company brought to the homebuilding process hasn’t carried the premium it once did.
“It’s been terrible in the last couple of years,” Dietzen said. “From the peak of the boom to now, starts were off by about 75 percent.”
Despite the generally bleak condition of the housing market — which has shown signs of life in recent months — Dietzen is looking for his company to thrive again in an upswing.
According to December data, Denver builders sold one home per community per month on average in the third quarter of last year. That figure increased from 0.7 homes per month during the same period a year earlier.
“There is a lot of boom and bust,” Dietzen said. “There’s going to be big demand.”
Impressive savings
With its software, Keymark can cut down on the cost to build a house by reducing the waste at a job site, Dietzen said. Instead of on-site construction workers cutting and assembling the lumber that makes up a house frame — along with wasted material from mistakes in that process — Keymark delivers lumber that has been cut according to the design specifications of a house.
With lumber cut to precise measurements, homebuilders can cut down on the amount of waste produced at a construction site. That means less money for materials and disposal, said Dietzen. For instance, one Dumpster of materials can cost $400 per disposal and another $1,000 on labor for unused material. That is on top of the actual cost of the material.
“We just push a button and download all the data to the plant and then feed our automated saw,” said Dietzen. “We then package it up and send it out to the job site.”
Without wasted parts, builders can save homebuyers thousands of dollars, Dietzen said.
Developers who have used Keymark’s products are quick to tout the precision and cost savings of the system.
A couple of years ago, Steve Bainbridge moved to Frisco after returning from Europe. A developer, he had planned to build a house in the area and heard of Keymark through a friend.
He decided to give the company a try.
“After a few weeks, I spoke to my foreman and asked him how they were,” said Bainbridge, who noted that Keymark’s precut lumber had gotten down to within 1/16th of an inch. “He was blown away.”
Basement beginnings
Dietzen started Keymark in 1975.
“I started it by myself in my basement,” Dietzen said. “I had worked in the house-building industry when a friend turned me on to software development.
“I thought, ‘Let’s automate,’ ” Dietzen said. “We’ll build a scale model of the house someone wants us to build. We’ll automate the calculation of what people need.”
The process for the company came to a halt when the housing bubble burst.
When the market does come back, Dietzen expects there will be a premium on lowering construction costs. That will help the industry adopt services like Keymark’s.
“The homebuilding industry is slow to change,” he said. “We’re very hopeful that will change.”
