Block by block, brick by brick, devastated Altadena, CA, is slowly coming back 18 months after the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires.
And in one case, an empty lot will have a rebuilt home on it in a matter of months, as one of the first factory-built homes in the comes together near Fair Oaks Avenue. And its builder hopes it’s a chance for the growing segment of the building business to shine.
Slowly and steadily, communities and homeowners have been rebuilding from the fires that struck the region in January 2025. But while the government has put significant money into the process, residents are still frustrated with the slow pace of rebuilding, held up by red tape and insurance payouts slow to come in.
Enter Bryan Henson, president and CEO of factory builder BevyHouse. He spent 10 years as a custom homebuilder in Santa Barbara, CA, during the 2008 housing crash. And he took interest in prefab once he realized the industry would face a crisis once experienced builders began retiring and no one replaced them.
That interest came to the fore as he saw the massive challenge faced by thousands of Altadena homeowners trying to rebuild. The Palisades and Eaton fires caused between $76 billion and $131 billion in property and capital losses, UCLA Anderson forecasted. Thousands of people are still displaced.
“A wildfire victim lost everything, and now they’re thrust into a homebuilding project,” Henson says. “Now not only do they have to get their life back together, but also they have one of the most important financial projects they’ll ever undertake.”
“That’s super messy,” Henson says. “And it definitely does not fit at all in with the timetables of California‘s permitting system.”
Expedited rebuild
For the rebuild, Bevyhouse sought to maintain the overall layout and approximate footprint of the home. The company kept the bay windows and traditional interior wood detailing. But it also modernized some parts of the home. That included an expanded kitchen, modern appliances, and some subtle updates to the facade.
The relatively flat Altadena land made for easy building, compared to the more challenging hillsides in areas like the Palisades and Malibu. So the builder undertook on-site ground work and in-factory vertical work in parallel — assembling the five room-modules in its factory, while concrete and the garage set on site.
The most visible construction work came on July 28, when cranes and trucks came rolling past Fair Oaks Avenue to drop off five modules, lowering them into place via crane. For the next few weeks contractors will connect them and link the home to the local infrastructure, sewer, and power lines.
When it’s done, the one-story, 1,827-square-foot home will have two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a two-car garage. The work could take just six months to complete, compared to almost 18 months for a typical custom home build.
Designed by Hunter Smith Architecture, this is Bevyhouse’s first project delivered in Altadena. But the project didn’t need to be complicated.
“People were living in these homes for 30 or 40 years; they don’t want something new. They just want what they had,” Henson says. “They wanted the feeling of the home they had.”
Housing crisis ‘silver bullet’
The manufactured housing industry has long suffered from a lack of good definition. Off-site construction can be conflated with mobile homes, and the industry doesn’t have major financial backers yet.
California, with its longstanding housing crisis, has proposed some laws to ease manufactured homebuilding in the state.
The fires are a factor. The total value of destroyed homes in the fire zones of the Pacific Palisades fell from $14.7 billion to $10.8 billion, and in Altadena from $7 billion to $4.7 billion, according to Realtor.com® housing data analysis between late 2024 and the second half of 2025.
Henson says the scope of the wildfire and the way it’s hamstrung the local homebuilding market could be a new opportunity for the industry to prove itself. Bevyhouse says it has additional homes planned in both neighborhoods.
“We just cannot, as an industry, continue to do things the old way,” Henson says. “The massive silver bullet to California is that the state is exceptionally unbureaucratic and fast when it comes to permitting factory-build housing. It’s the one thing they do very well.”
