In a questionnaire the Vermont State Treasurer’s office sent to homebuilders in August is a question the state does not usually ask out loud: if the total delivered cost of housing had to fall by 10 to 15 percent, what would government have to do to make that happen?
Here is what that range is worth. Housing Commissioner Alex Farrell told the Valley News in February that a builder producing the state’s catalog homes at something closer to $450,000 a unit would be about as good as the current market offers in Vermont. Ten to fifteen percent off that is roughly $45,000 to $67,000 a house.
The office is asking two audiences. One questionnaire went to manufacturers of factory-built housing. The other went to developers, housing sponsors, and housing organizations. Both are Requests for Information, or RFIs, the questionnaires a government sends out before it decides whether to build a program at all. Nobody bids, nobody wins anything, and the state is not obligated to act on any of it. What it gets is a picture of the market it would be stepping into.
The program almost didn’t survive the session
The pilot behind these questions was stripped out of one bill and put back into another inside a single session.
It started life in H.775 in January, and it was a bigger thing then. The Off-Site Construction Accelerator was to be run by the Agency of Commerce and Community Development with Buildings and General Services, backed by what HousingWire put at roughly $12 million in Treasurer credit facilities — pools of state cash the Treasurer can lend out, as opposed to money the Legislature appropriates and spends.
It did not survive the Senate. As HousingWire reported, housing department officials told lawmakers the agency did not have the capacity to administer the accelerator, Gov. Phil Scott asked for its removal, and the Senate Economic Development Committee agreed. Advocates then pushed to restore it in conference, arguing that zoning and permit reform alone would not produce houses.
What came out the other side, in Act 179, is smaller and lives somewhere else. The pilot belongs to the Treasurer now, not to the Agency of Commerce. And the statute is written almost entirely in “may.” The Treasurer may develop and administer the pilot. The pilot may consider bulk purchasing, a loan loss reserve for construction loans, and a statewide procurement consortium. The Treasurer may identify whether a state guarantee is feasible.
That is the difference between a program the Legislature funded and a program the Legislature permitted. It also explains why the first public step is two questionnaires rather than a purchase order: an office that inherited a program mid-session has to find out what it inherited.
What off-site construction actually means
The documents use three terms interchangeably enough to lose anyone who hasn’t been in the room.
Modular and volumetric modular construction means whole three-dimensional sections of a house are built on a factory floor, trucked to the site, and set on a foundation.
Panelized construction means the flat pieces are built in the factory — walls, floors, roof sections — and assembled on site.
Manufactured housing is a separate federal category, built to a federal code rather than a state building code.
The pitch for all of it is the same. Vermont has a short building season and a thin, aging construction workforce. A factory works in February.
The money is the Treasurer’s own cash
There is no appropriation behind this. The pilot draws on the Treasurer’s authority under 10 V.S.A. § 10 — the program the office markets as 10% in VT, which lets the Treasurer lend out a slice of the state’s day-to-day cash balance at low interest instead of parking it.
Act 179 raised that ceiling from 10 percent to 12.5 percent. The Joint Fiscal Office’s analysis put practical numbers on it: the committee overseeing the program had authorized a $120 million cap against an estimated $1.2 to $1.5 billion average cash balance through fiscal 2027, and the Treasurer’s office estimates the increase unlocks about $25 million more. The cost to the General Fund is up to $600,000 a year in interest the state gives up by lending the money cheap rather than earning market rates on it.
For scale, the Treasurer’s office says the program has put more than $130 million into projects supporting over 1,600 homes since 2023.
Bulk buying needs someone to buy from
The theory is that aggregated demand lowers price. The manufacturer questionnaire tests that theory hard. It asks what minimum order quantity unlocks a discount, what discount to expect at various volumes, and whether volume, repeatability, or production certainty matters most to pricing. It asks whether a multi-year purchase commitment from the state would change a manufacturer’s capacity or investment decisions. And one question asks whether purchasing power is really the constraint at all, or whether demand certainty, standardized products, and financing matter more.
Vermont has a specific reason to ask. The state’s factory base got smaller, not larger, while this idea was being debated. Vermod, the White River Junction manufacturer that produced Vermont’s zero-energy modular homes, closed in late 2024 or early 2025. Huntington Homes in East Montpelier, with a 100,000-square-foot plant, is the in-state manufacturer most Vermont buyers start with.
If the consortium works and the modules come from Quebec or Pennsylvania, Vermont gets cheaper houses and another state gets the factory jobs. That is a real outcome rather than a failure — cheaper houses are the point — but it is a different outcome than the one the accelerator’s supporters described, and these questionnaires are where the state finds out which one it is buying.
The catalog is the other half
Both documents ask respondents to estimate how much 802 Homes could cut delivered costs, and the manufacturer version asks whether the catalog’s current mix of multifamily designs is enough for the market.
802 Homes is the state’s set of ten pre-approved, construction-ready house plans, from accessory dwelling units up to four-unit buildings, designed to be built either on site or in a factory, and offered free. Compass covered the $500,000 contract that sent that design work to a Boston firm in February, and the regulatory obstacles facing factory-built housing in Vermont before that. The catalog and the accelerator were always meant to work together: standardized plans are what make a bulk order possible, because a factory prices repetition, not craftsmanship.
Standardization is also the trade the state puts to builders directly. One question asks manufacturers whether they would accept more standardization in their orders in exchange for lower delivered cost. Another asks how much of the current price is customization in the first place.
What happens next
Responses close Sept. 30. The Treasurer reports annually on credit facility activity on or before Nov. 15, which is the next point at which any of this becomes visible in a public document.
Nothing in these two questionnaires builds a house. What they do is put a number on a claim the state has been making for two sessions — that building houses in a factory is cheaper — and ask the people who would have to deliver it whether that is true, and by how much.
If you build, sell, or sponsor housing in Vermont
Two questionnaires are open. One is for manufacturers of modular, panelized, and other factory-built housing. One is for developers, housing sponsors, and housing organizations building in Vermont.
Deadline: Sept. 30. Responses go to peter.trombley@vermont.gov. Narrative format is fine, and cost estimates, studies, and project examples can be attached.
This is not a bid. Both documents state that they are for information-gathering only and create no contract and no obligation.