“The quarterback of prefab:" How Oh Snap Layout and Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc. are rewriting the rules of homebuilding

Private residential homebuilding, with nearly $920B of work placed in 2024, is the heavyweight sector of the U.S. construction industry — far surpassing nonresidential ($744B) and public construction ($430B) sectors (see the data).

And it’s broken.

That’s the opinion of both Aaron Love, the founder, President and CEO of Oh Snap Layout, and Randall Richards, Executive Vice President of Operations and Sales at Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc. They’ve partnered to create RapidShell™, a fully custom prefabricated framing package that includes multi-trade coordination and layout services. It is a complete reimagining of residential construction, and that’s not wishful thinking. They have receipts: one of the largest production homebuilders in the U.S. uses RapidShell™ to reduce the time to construct a house shell by more than 50%. “Their cycle times were anywhere from 21 to 23 days to build the shell,” says Love. "We've been able to cut that more than in half to 9 to 11 days.”

“Their cycle times were anywhere from 21 to 23 days to build the shell. We’ve been able to cut that more than in half to 9 to 11 days.”

Aaron Love

President and CEO

RapidShell™ has been deployed on hundreds of homes in the last six months, and demand is accelerating.

“Nobody cares about lumber…” so Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc. stopped being just another lumber company

Established in 1928, family-owned and operated Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc. has been supplying lumber, panels, and EWP to national and regional homebuilders across Southern California and Las Vegas for nearly 100 years. Having been with Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc. for over five decades, Richards has played an integral role in the market’s transition from traditional stick-frame construction to prefabricated components. Along the way, he has watched margins tighten and a challenging labor market develop throughout the region.

While the Southern California homebuilding market evolved, he watched most lumber suppliers respond by competing on price. He knew that wasn’t a winning strategy. “No one really cares about lumber,” he said, “so we’ve been good about reaching for something different, to keep us relevant in the new home construction market.”

That instinct led Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc. into prefabricated wall panels, and they made it work where other companies haven’t. “We’ve done prefabricated walls for eight years, and we’re one of the few that have been able to make it successful,” Richards said. Today, Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc. ships 30 to 40 truckloads — approximately 30 homes of material — per day. But the full potential of prefab needs more than just operational efficiencies to scale.

Prefabrication is the future of homebuilding, but it needs a quarterback

Prefabrication has an overlooked dependency. Every component built in a factory is designed to land in a precise location on the concrete slab. If the layout on that slab doesn’t match the precision of the factory-built components, the entire strategy falls apart. A framer with a chalk line can get close. But with prefab, “close” means “rebuild the whole assembly.”

A few years ago, Richards came across an advertisement for a construction robot that could print layout directly on concrete. He had seen automated layout work on larger buildings, but knew that it would also work for single-family homes. He saw Dusty as the missing piece for Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc.’s prefab business: a way to ensure that factory precision survived contact with the jobsite. He brought the idea to Love, a longtime business partner.

Love started his career in framing, built a pre-cut framing lumber company, and sold it to Simpson Strong-Tie in 2022. Along the way, he saw the same mistake on every project: architects and engineers design homes with sophisticated digital tools, but the moment those designs leave the office, all that intelligence gets stripped down to a few chalklines.

“We use very fancy software on the front end of the design process, but then we dumb it down to a picture,” Love said. “Then we take that picture and try to reinsert all this technology back around it.”

Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc. partnered with Oh Snap Layout to develop RapidShell™, a bundled package that combines pre-cut framing, prefabricated floor cassettes, prefabricated stairs, and Dusty-powered layout into a single product for builders. Every component is designed digitally, built to spec, and labeled so it matches what the robot prints on the slab. Wall 16 on the lumber matches Wall 16 on the concrete.

It’s a fully coordinated multi-trade design transferred to the jobsite with Dusty-powered layout. “Dusty’s role is almost like the quarterback,” Love said, “because it’s printing and labeling where all the parts and the pieces go together.” He continued, “Dusty takes all the guesswork out of prefabricated components," Love said. "Rather than a guy with a chalk line and a set of plans trying to figure out how this very detailed and technical package gets put together, we just take that package and put it directly on the slab."

“Dusty’s role is like the quarterback, because it’s printing and labeling where all the parts go together. Rather than a guy with a chalk line and a set of plans trying to figure out how this very detailed and technical package gets put together, we just take that package and put it directly on the slab.”

Aaron Love

President and CEO

Those coordination and layout capabilities bring huge value to other types of construction as well. Oh Snap Layout is an expert layout services provider for warehouses, commercial and industrial projects, data centers, manufacturing facilities, and other non-residential projects as well.

Touch it once, do it right, don’t touch it again

The schedule gains from automated layout are the aggregate effect of increased production efficiency, fewer errors, and the elimination of return trips that accumulate across trades on a residential build.

For example, Oh Snap Layout uses Dusty to lay out prefabricated floor cassettes in the warehouse, before they ship to the jobsite. Normally, upper-level layout requires a separate crew after the cassette is set. With Oh Snap Layout, “we can start framing as soon as we set that cassette onsite,” Love says.

Another example: In a typical build, the framer builds the structure and leaves. MEP trades arrive to install their work. Then the framer comes back to block around penetrations. Dusty lays out penetrations from the start, and the framer handles all of it on the first trip. “You’re saving 2 or 3 trips for each trade,” Love said. For him, it’s about sticking to first principles. “If I’ve got to touch something two times, I’ve ruined the whole philosophy of prefab. The idea is: touch it once, do it right, don’t touch it again.”

The compounding effect shows up in the numbers. “[Developers’] carrying cost can be hundreds of dollars a day per lot,” Love said. “The sooner they can build it, the sooner they can flip it and sell it without carrying that cost.” Across a tract of homes with 10 or more days saved per build, the financial impact is substantial.

And the trades are getting involved voluntarily. “Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc.’s not paying the electrician to be out there, or the lighting or HVAC,” Richards said. “They’re coming and understanding the impact of what we’re doing, and they want to be a part of it.”

RapidShell™ helped builders reduce rework right from the start. On one of the first RapidShell™ jobs, Richards was on the jobsite when a superintendent walked over and pointed to what he assumed was an error in the printed layout: a wall line 6” off from an in-wall drain stack. The superintendent thought the layout was wrong. Richards knew it was the opposite — the layout had exposed a defect in the plumbing work. “He said, ‘So you’re telling me I can pick up my phone right now, before we even start standing the walls, call the plumber to get his butt out there and fix this?’” Richards recalled. “I said, ‘If I was you, I would, because that way you’re not going to have to jackhammer underneath the wall and have a guy down on his hands and knees trying to dig it out.’” The superintendent called the plumber on the spot.

Builders are telling other suppliers to match what Reliable Wholesale Lumber, Inc. does — or lose the business

The strongest validation of RapidShell™ comes from feedback from the homebuilders. One leading national builder "told their suppliers, ‘You are not going to sell us any lumber packages unless you can provide these layout services alongside,’” Love said. “They want what Oh Snap Layout and RapidShell™ are doing as a package.” When the largest lumber supplier in the country pursued that builder’s business, they discovered the rules had changed.

For Richards, the competitive advantage isn’t the robot or any single piece of equipment. It’s the system. “There are millions of guitars in the world,” he said. “There’s a handful of people who can actually play them. We spent years developing this system. Anybody can go out and buy the stuff. Anybody can go out and rent it. But we make it sing.”

“We’re setting a standard for the new way of building for the one and a half million new homes built every year in the U.S.,” Love said.