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Show Notes:
Learn how site-specific structural design, factory lumber culling, and whole-building energy calculations protect owner-builders from carrier insurance surcharges, jobsite framing delays, and thermal inspection failures. We examine why panelized homes insure at the exact same rates as conventional stick-built construction, bypassing the costly premiums, restrictive underwriting riders, and personal property stigmas attached to modular units or steel-chassis HUD trailers. Discover how factory-controlled fabrication eliminates warped, crowned, and wane-heavy dimensional studs before wall sections are assembled, protecting your project from crooked drywall finishes and on-site lumberyard waste. We explore why modern energy codes analyze heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and solar solar heat gain coefficients across the complete building envelope—illustrating why deep roof overhangs and seasonal sun azimuth angles prevent interior overheating and right-size HVAC tonnage. Finally, see how ordering precision factory-built wall panels allows owner-builders to design your own custom home with total budget and structural confidence.Key Q&A Highlights from Episode 98
Q: Do insurance companies charge higher homeowners or builder’s risk premiums for panelized homes?
A: No, insurance carriers underwrite panelized homes under the identical rating class and premium schedules as traditional stick-built homes because they are built to the standard International Residential Code (IRC). Unlike HUD-code manufactured trailers or modular structures—which insurers often classify under non-standard property forms due to proprietary factory parts or higher replacement costs—panelized homes use conventional dimensional lumber and inspect locally, carrying standard builder’s risk and hazard insurance rates.
Q: How does factory lumber culling differ from the lumber delivered by a local building supply yard?
A: Local lumberyards dump banded bunks of mill-graded #2 lumber directly onto jobsites, where up to 15% of the boards contain severe warping, crowning, or heavy bark wane that framers must either discard or force into walls. In a controlled panelized manufacturing facility, technicians inspect each board before jig assembly, culling out defective studs and using computerized saws to ensure only straight, true, defect-free lumber is assembled into structural panels.
Q: Why does whole-building envelope energy modeling matter more than individual component R-values?
A: Modern building departments calculate thermal compliance across the home as a unified system rather than evaluating individual wall cavities in isolation. High-performance low-E window glazing, continuous exterior rigid foam, and mechanical HVAC efficiency offset areas with dimensional framing limits—such as compact cathedral roof rafter bays—allowing the complete residential envelope to exceed local energy targets without requiring impractical framing depths.
Q: How can moving a custom home footprint by a single degree cause a Title 24 energy calculation failure?
A: In strict energy jurisdictions like California, Title 24 compliance software models seasonal solar heat gain based on the home’s exact geographic coordinates and orientation. Shifting a footprint by just one degree can rotate large expanse view windows directly into peak afternoon sun exposure, causing calculated indoor cooling loads to spike beyond allowable compliance margins unless counterbalanced with deeper eave overhangs or higher-rated window coatings.
Q: Can owner-builders safely make architectural changes after ordering a panelized home package?
A: Yes, architectural modifications can be incorporated during the preliminary blueprint phase, such as adjusting room dimensions, reconfiguring kitchen layouts, or modifying rooflines, with minimal impact on budget. While structural changes remain technically possible during final engineering or active framing, doing so requires engineering recalculations and municipal plan revisions, making early preliminary plan coordination the most cost-effective approach.
Steve Tuma: And there’s kind of a trick here, because I’ve seen some people say, “Oh, you can’t change panelized homes. They’re this and that.” It’s like, it’s just like a stick-built home. So if you can change a stick-built home, you can change this.
Host: How’s it going, everyone, and welcome to episode 98 of the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show. With me today, as he usually is, is the president and founder of Landmark Home and Land Company, a company which has been helping people build their new homes where they want, exactly as they want, nationwide and around the globe since 1993, Mr. Steve Tuma. Steve, how’s it going, amigo?
Steve Tuma: It’s going great. Like I always say, it’s always a great day to talk about building houses, especially our panelized homes and how we can help customers. There’s a lot of customers coming through with different projects. Some of them are ADUs, some of them are retirement homes, vacation homes, some of them are just scaled-down homes as the kids fly the coop, or sometimes it’s families getting a bigger home as the family grows.
So it’s kind of interesting working in a lot of places: Florida, Colorado, California, the plains states, Northeast, Northwest as well. So we’ve got projects all over the country. It’s pretty interesting. It’s kind of fun—a lot of fun, actually.
Host: Awesome. So today we’re diving back into a group of very general, but also very important questions from potential homeowner-builders as sent in to the Landmark Home and Land Company website and just pulled off the web. So I guess this could be looked at as part three or four in a series—I lose track. And I appreciate you just being here to answer all these questions.
They’re all very well thought out and important questions, and I think we should give them each all the time it takes to answer them. So if we’re going to go through parts one, two, three, four, whatever it takes, as long as we get all these good questions in.
So let’s get rolling. First out of the box today is an insurance question, and this one is typical of many we’ve received on this subject. The question is: Are panelized homes more expensive to insure? What are your thoughts on that?
Steve Tuma: Panelized homes are considered to be stick-built homes, which is just the same home that is very common all over the United States. So, no. Panelized homes are not an abnormal building system. They are very normal, just like a stick-built home, so they aren’t more expensive to insure.
Now, the location you choose to put them might be different, but the actual apples-to-apples panelized home versus stick-built, it’s the exact same thing. I think what happens is sometimes people will say, “Oh, prefab,” or this or that, it’s more expensive because sometimes there’s different types of building systems that are considered abnormal, maybe more expensive or harder to replace, where insurance companies may have concerns. But apples-for-apples, panelized homes are the same to insure as if it was a conventionally stick-built home in the same neighborhood with the same features.
So I’ve never heard of a problem. I’ve talked to insurance people because sometimes customers will have them call about builder’s risk insurance or whatever they need during the building phases. And, no, panelized homes are insured just like any other home, which is pretty cool.
I think these questions are kind of based because there’s a lot of stuff on the internet and kind of hearsay, and people just want to know how it applies. As we all know, on the internet, anyone can place an opinion, whether they have knowledge of their opinion is the thing that I think people are asking. And that’s where we’re able to go through and take a general question or general answer and then apply it to a specific situation and add a lot of clarity so people understand how it affects their possible build with us.
Host: Yeah, and you were right about apples-for-apples. I mean, somebody builds a home in Texas, and then they get a little taken aback because they see somebody in Wyoming had the same design, but their quote for their insurance was less. And that’s what happens on the internet: people generalize everything and don’t take into consideration that things are going to change county-to-county, state-to-state.
Steve Tuma: Right. Exactly. And it’s also, what was that joke a little while ago? “Must be true, it’s on the internet.” Sometimes people get an internet PhD, but is the information actually there?
So that’s why we’re going over these questions to add some definitive clarity on how it applies to the panelized home.
Host: Yeah, and I think people should—you’re right to beware of what you’re learning on the internet, because it ain’t always so. It’s like these people that diagnose their medical conditions on what they read. It’s like a house would be the same thing: you want to get an expert opinion, you don’t want to just read on the internet and then take that as gospel.
Anyway, here’s a question about design. And we talk a lot about design, but I don’t know that we’ve covered enough about, let’s say, a Landmark design: I order a design and I’m going to build a house based on a design that you guys have up on the website. But after I’ve ordered it, how much of that design can be changed? Is it pretty versatile, or what do you think?
Steve Tuma: Well, this is an interesting thing, because I’ve been asked this question a lot, and I’ve seen a lot of questions online. And there’s kind of a trick here, because I’ve seen some people say, “Oh, you can’t change panelized homes. They’re this and that.” It’s just like a stick-built home. So if you can change a stick-built home, you can change this.
So I think what gets into it is the actual building process. With any type of house, you’re going to have to commit at some point to say, “Hey, these are the final plans,” so that your builder can go through. And if you’re buying modular, you’re going to sign off: this is it, no changes, so they can go into production. It’s going to be the same with trailers: this is it, you can go through.
So there is a certain limitation where customers should understand that they should limit their changes after a certain point just to keep their schedule online, to keep their budget in line. So the reality is you can make changes whenever you want. It’s just a matter of how reasonable it is and is it going to add to the cost considerably.
So in our case, we’ve got the preliminary plan stage where we go through with the customer on their plan and the changes they want. And if they want to go through a couple sets of revisions—moving doors, making a roof pitch steeper, making it lower, adding a garage, redoing the kitchen, updating bathrooms, pretty much any design—we can work on those designs up until the point the customer says, “Yes, I got it. That’s the exact design I want. Let’s move forward.”
So we don’t limit their ability to do changes to the design, because we take pride in helping our customers get the home they want. And that’s the key thing. And the home they want is generally prefaced by, “Hey, let’s design it so it works with this particular family’s needs.”
Now, when a general question like this is asked, it’s like, at what point is it reasonable or unreasonable? So in the preliminary plan stage, we can do changes. Even in final sets of plans, we can do changes if they’re necessary, but customers have to understand that sometimes when we’re in the finalization stage, if they ask for a change, we might have to take two or three steps back to allow that to happen.
So it is possible anywhere in the building process to make changes to the home design, the home structure, the home package itself. It’s just how much of a hassle is it. If the house is framed and someone says, “Oh, I want to make a window bigger,” or “I want to add a fourth-car garage,” obviously, it takes a little work to do that work, but it can be done.
So whenever I see this or get asked this question, I ask the customer: What is, when are you wanting to do this change, and what type of change is it?
So let’s just say someone ordered a two-story home, and suddenly they decide when they’re framing a house that, hey, they want a one-story home. Obviously, it’s a little late. I mean, you can do it, but it’s just expensive, really hurts your schedule, it’s a big hassle. But if someone took a two-story home and said, “Hey, I want to make the kitchen window a little bigger,” or, “Hey, I want to change the kitchen from an island to a peninsula,” you know, there’s certain things that you can do.
So a lot of it really comes down to what the change is and the timing, and then also particular design characteristics. So it’s kind of hard to give a yes or no definitive answer to that, but the reality is you can do a change anytime with a Landmark panelized home. It’s just a matter of it’s easier if you do it up in the preliminary plan stages. As you get into the final plans or the actual delivery of the home package, it just gets to be a lot harder, and we ask people to avoid that. But if something absolutely has to happen, we’re open to doing whatever’s necessary to make sure a customer gets a house.
And what’s interesting about this is these changes are sometimes derived from the customer just asking for something. Sometimes it’s a lifestyle change: suddenly the grandparents have to move in, or they need to change a den into a convertible suite, type of a thing, so when the grandparents stay there, they have stuff. Sometimes there’s just a big change. Other times they find something out that kind of pushes them into a change.
But the reality is we work very hard up front to make sure that we understand the ground conditions—basically the terrain of the land—the building department requirements, the engineering requirements, the energy code requirements, and the architectural and structural details, so we’ve got a very strong grasp on the home design to make sure that the home is just the way a customer wants it to be.
So it’s a lot better to do it up front in the preliminary design stage. It’s faster, easier, generally doesn’t cost as much, if anything. A lot of the changes customers want, we just make them part of the package to make sure that the home is just the way they want it.
Host: Does that include customizations? I mean, obviously, the design of the home is one thing, but then those little customized jobs, can that become problematic if people are making a lot of smaller changes to customize their home design?
Steve Tuma: Well, it depends on what it is. So let’s just say someone had a two-story home with a flat roof, kind of a modernistic design, and then for some reason, they wanted to make it a very steep 12/12 gable-end pitch roof. That’s a big change. But if necessary, we’ll figure it out. We’ll work with them to do it.
But if someone goes through and goes, “You know, I thought I was going to get this type of light to hang in the cathedral ceiling in the dining room, but now I’m going to go with a different light,” generally, that’s not as big of a deal; it doesn’t really affect the structure in most cases.
So it depends on what it is. If someone says, “Hey, I want hickory kitchen cabinets instead of oak,” as long as they haven’t ordered the cabinets, they should be okay. And for us to change plans to say oak cabinets, or change it from a peninsula to an island, we can work with them on those.
So, again, it’s kind of like: What is the change, and where are we in the process? The key to it is we’re very customer-service-oriented, so we’ll spend the time to figure out a way to get the customer taken care of. So far, we’ve been able to take care of every request, even if they’re kind of out there. We’ll do our best to get them taken care of, because we are in the business of helping owner-builders, and sometimes things just come up.
I had a customer email me, and they’re having twins. It wasn’t exactly part of the schedule. But it happens, so now we’ve got to change some of the bedroom layouts and bathroom layouts in the house, and we’re pretty deep in the design. But in that particular situation, we’re doing it, and it’s kind of working relatively easy without a big hassle. So sometimes you get lucky.
Host: Let’s talk about energy for a moment. We do go through a lot of talking about energy codes and energy efficiencies, but one more time for our audience: Are panelized homes, especially Landmark Home and Land Company homes, inherently more energy efficient? In your opinion, you’ve seen all kinds of companies and how they build things, but where does Landmark stack up when it comes to energy efficiency?
Steve Tuma: What’s interesting about that is each state has its own energy efficiency standard and calculation method, so you’ve got to meet that or exceed that. And we generally work to exceed, so that theoretically makes ours more energy efficient than the code.
But the key thing to this is it’s not that it’s a panelized home; it’s what Landmark Home and Land Company does to the panelized home design in the process. So it’s kind of a situation of what we do to work with the design to make sure the architectural features and the structures of our home allow for a higher energy efficiency.
So sometimes people—and this is, I think, what we’re trying to point out—is Landmark Home and Land Company’s panelized homes are the best homes out there. There’s a lot more thinking and design going into your own custom home.
Every once in a while, I get plans that were drawn up by someone’s local architect or friend, and they’ll go through and value engineer it and do all these things with cool-sounding words, and say, for some reason, they’ll have a cathedral ceiling—say of a dining room off the back of the house—and they’ll go through and make it with a 2×6 roof joist. Okay, so you have generally 5.5 inches of space in a 2×6. Well, if for some reason you need an R-48 insulation in there, there just isn’t space for it.
So you can’t put 10 gallons of water in a 5-gallon bucket at one time. So by us going through and understanding the design to say, “Hey, we’re going to need a certain energy efficiency or to exceed it a certain amount, we need to have a certain amount of space,” so then we go through the complete design, from foundation up to the peak, to figure out what type of insulation needs to be there, and also make sure that the materials can fit in the space. Now, l et me digress a little. A lot of people come through and say, “Well, code in my area is an R-30 roof or R-48.” It’s like, I’ve never really seen that, but I’ve seen where generally that’s how the calculations end up working out. So the energy calculations are like for the home as a unit. It’s not necessarily one wall has to be like this and another wall has to be like that; they look at the unit of the house.
So, looking at the energy efficiency, we can go through and do the energy calculations, make sure that there’s space in the structure—under the foundation, around the foundation, in the roof, in the eaves, between floors—to make sure the insulation is there. But it’s also what we’re able to do—and I think we’re extremely unique in this additional service that we supply for customers—is we can go through and do the HVAC system—heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems—to go through and design the system so that it is energy efficient.
Way back before these calculations were generally done, people would just say, “Oh, I’m going to put a 100,000 BTU furnace in there; that’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years.”
Host: Right.
Steve Tuma: It’s like, okay, well, 30 years ago, things weren’t as efficient. They didn’t have the insulation, they didn’t have the windows, so right now, you may not need as big of a furnace to heat the same size house, because modern homes have better windows, better insulation, maybe different overhangs.
So there’s also something in the energy efficiency for your HVAC, there’s also energy efficiency in the lighting, and then there’s also energy efficiency in the actual design. To simplify, like overhangs: a bigger overhang is going to keep more of the summer sun out of your window. So different things like that, where if you have a different overhang, the sun doesn’t go past your eave in through your window and then magnified in your living room space. It’s not going to heat up as much if you have a bigger overhang.
So I think what it is, is the understanding of what we have of the energy efficiency not just being how much insulation you have—that’s what most people think—but also how is the house designed, are there specifications on lighting, are there specifications on the HVAC design? Even the orientation of the home on the land. We’ve done a lot of net-zero homes, we’ve done a lot with solar.
So the nature of it is that the Landmark Home and Land Company panelized homes can be very energy efficient, and I think we go to an extreme to make sure that we take care of every advantage that we can. And it’s basically just us looking at it to go through and do it.
What’s cool about this: it’s just part of what we supply. It’s not an additional cost to make your house more energy efficient. We automatically go through to work things out as well as we can.
And something that people should hear is a lot of states are tightening up the energy calculations, and this last revision, it got a lot tighter. Over the last decade or two, they did stuff, but it wasn’t something significant. But in most states, it really took a jump. California’s always been tighter, but we’ve gotten every single house to pass. So it’s a matter of taking the time to understand what a customer wants, make sure that the design is right, make sure that the architectural and structural features are right so that energy efficiency can be kind of designed right into the home. It’s what we do every day.
Host: Yeah, I’m sure you’re playing advisor a lot, and people would want that. I would want somebody to tell me, “Hey, you’ve got that 12-foot window that’s really beautiful, but you might not want it facing that 11:00 AM to noon sun coming in.”
Steve Tuma: Right, and sometimes it’s something as simple as that. And in some states, like California, the Title 24 calculations do consider the orientation of the house. So if you have a house with a huge glass wall facing south in California, that’s a lot of sun beating in there, which means that, hey, you got a lot of air conditioning going on, and they want to limit the use of energy.
So sometimes you can counteract it different ways or work things out. It’s never stopped us from giving the customer a design that they want; it’s just, you know, we’ve got to jump over a few more hurdles to make it work. And we’ve done enough of them where we can take care of pretty much what the customers want.
One house, as a little side story: one house in California, moving the house one degree changed the passing and failing of an energy calculation due to that exact situation you brought up.
Host: That’s crazy.
Steve Tuma: Yeah, I mean, one degree. It’s like, what’s that, a hair? But that’s how tricky it is.
But, hey, another thing: we put those details on the plans. Our customers, as owner-builders, it’s good to make sure that it actually gets executed on site, because a lot of building departments will ask for energy efficiency, but amazingly, they don’t check it. They check it in permitting, but are they out there really checking the nooks and crannies and finer details? Not all of them do; they don’t have the knowledge or manpower, in some cases, I think, desire to do it.
So that’s where we can help a customer so that they understand what’s in a home, so that when they’re talking to their HVAC guy or their insulation person, that they know what to ask for and make sure it gets happened. It’s part of the customer support we have.
Host: Well, experience is everything, man. You guys have seen it all, which is—
Steve Tuma: It’s experience, but it’s also the desire to help. It’s putting it in place. These energy codes are all over, but who’s going to take the time? And that’s really what it comes into when someone’s looking at Landmark versus maybe other options, is like, hey, wait a second, it’s not just the panels; it’s the service, the design, the making sure it’s done right, the details—that’s what makes sense. And that’s where we can help people and also review it with them so that they understand what’s going on.
Host: A lot of people are inquiring online about—let’s face it, the prices of lumber and the quality of lumber coming in has been like a roller coaster the last five years or so. People are just going nuts about what a 2×4 used to cost as opposed to what it costs now. But talk about the quality that is used—Landmark lumber quality. It’s factory-built, so are people expecting a higher quality from a factory-built home, or are they expecting that the local lumber place shows up with their flatbed and dumps it and that’s going to be higher quality? Is factory lumber higher quality than anything else?
Steve Tuma: In general, the materials that go through a factory, they’re all graded as wood is—#1, #2, stud grade, all these different things. But the point is, we cull out the things that we don’t believe are up to grade.
The grading of lumber, in my opinion, has a big variation. So when a piece of wood goes through, even though it may be graded a certain grade, if it just doesn’t look right—too much waning, which is like bark on it, or just not a rectangular piece of 2×4 or whatever—it gets thrown to the side.
Now, occasionally, something will slide through, but I think overall, customers tell us, “Man, this is just great-quality material.” We do go to the extra extent to make sure that we’ve got a better-looking, quality material, but of the graded materials that are necessary per our engineer specification and code requirements.
So that, I think, is something that is very important, is that people understand that we’re not just getting a stack of wood that’s cheap and twisted and putting it in a house. We are going through and culling the materials to get it put together. And people don’t ask that question, but that’s a very, very important situation.
You know, it’s kind of funny, to relate it to food: all of us know fast food places that the billboard has a picture of this incredibly juicy burger, but then the one that you actually get looks like someone stepped on it.
Host: Exactly. Exactly.
Steve Tuma: Yeah, we’re not in that business. We’re in the business of making sure we’ve got the best quality that can be supplied and that actually shows up. The pictures on our website are all from customers. It’s real pictures that customers took and we’ve supplied, so we want to be proud of it. It’s just the way it is: it’s better to do it right once than to redo it. We just want to make sure that we have the best product out there, and I believe we do.
Whatever we talked about—the financial parts of this, the insurance, the design, the energy efficiency, the actual quality—
Host: I’m sorry, man! I told you they’re all over the map, but I think they’re important to get them out there, so I appreciate your patience that I’m just throwing all these different, varying questions, but you always handle everything so well.
Steve Tuma: But this is what it’s about! I think a lot of these questions are questions that maybe some people never think about. They don’t even know. It’s like, “Hey, I want to build a house, what do I know?” Some people think a house is like a gallon of milk, it’s kind of a generic commodity. A panelized home is not a generic commodity; it’s something that we specifically design, engineer, and manufacture to give certain advantages.
And as customers go through and work with us, I think they really start seeing it and appreciating it, because not everyone knows to ask these questions upfront.
Host: Well, in the past, I’ve always kind of brought in themes—we talk about plans and it’s all about plans, or we talk about energy efficiency and it’s all about that. But the last five or six, I’ve just been throwing them out there and you’ve been swinging away and hitting them all, so good for you, man! That’s good.
Steve Tuma: Yeah.
Host: Well, that’s about all the time we have for this episode of the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show, but before we let you go, Steve, as we always like to do, please let the listeners know how to find out more about Landmark Home and Land Company and what all you guys are doing over there.
Steve Tuma: Well, I think the best thing to do is check out our website at LHLC.com. Again, that’s LHLC.com, kind of the initials of Landmark Home and Land Company. And they could check out the website: there’s videos, these podcasts are there, plans, different discussions on what we supply, working in different states, and it’s pretty cool.
What people are most interested in are the plans: what kind of designs? And we’ve got a few thousand plans on our website. Someone can go through there, look at a plan, and send us an email and say, “Hey, can you tell me about this plan? I want to build in Southern California, Northern Colorado, North Dakota, or wherever it is.” And they can send an inquiry in, we’ll follow up, help them through the process, and give them answers that are specific to their exact project.
You can also call in at 800-830-9788. Again, it’s 800-830-9788, and that phone rings right on Mike’s desk, and Mike understands the panelized process and he can explain how we can help and get you going. And at a certain point, once you’re at a point where you want to start doing plans, Mike will transfer you over to me. I’ll call and introduce myself, and then we can go through and work out the exact details of your new plan and get the project going.
We’re also on social media: X, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Facebook. But I’d say take a look at the website and then give us a call, and we’re here to help.
If someone’s got some questions or they just want to get in touch with me directly, I’m always available. You can call my direct cell phone at 708-205-2043, and we could have a talk about your house and see what we can do to help you and make it better. So we’re here to help.
Host: Yeah, and I’d recommend the website. I mean, you can find all these podcasts on the website, you can find informative videos on the website, lots of pictures, so yeah, LHLC.com, good place to go.
Fantastic! Well, thanks again, Steve, and thanks to all of you for listening to the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show. So for Landmark Home and Land Company President Steve Tuma and myself, y’all have a great week and we will see you next time. Thanks, Steve.
Steve Tuma: Thank you, everyone. It was a lot of fun. Great questions.
