Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:50)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities as discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:22)
My guest today is Alexis Rivas. Alexis is the co-founder and CEO of Cover, which is pioneering a new way of building homes. It's no surprise to anyone that aspects of our housing market is broken. The market is under supplied and littered with regulatory issues. The home building process has also not changed for the better part of a century. Alexis is attacking the problem and has taken a leaf out of the car industry's learnings to create a similar production process for home building.
In our discussion, we talk about his idea of Lego pieces for homes, how they're refining production with backyard homes first, and how this may change the way people buy and sell homes in the future. Please enjoy my conversation with Alexis Rivas.
So Alexis, this topic has been really interesting to me lately, especially after I discovered Cover and all that you're up to. And I thought the right way to frame this conversation would be to start very, very broad and very, very narrow with very specifically what Cover is doing in building. I'd love you to give your interpretation of like the supply and demand situation for housing in the United States writ large. When you approach this market, which is obviously enormous and this problem, what stands out to you after your many years of investigating it?

**Alexis Rivas** (3:37)
There's like a 5 million home shortage in the United States. So that's just a huge number. And then on top of that, you have places where you just cannot get the homes built that are needed because there isn't a supply of labor, because there's just neighborhoods, areas where there's a lack of skilled construction labor and there's demand for homes there. And those homes are just not getting built at all.
A couple of that with right now, high interest rates, it's even harder to afford a home, especially for a first time home buyer who's gonna have a lot of debt. On top of that, you add the fact that the construction workforce is aging and dwindling. The average is around 45, which is really older than it's ever been. That's a kind of scary situation because it's not getting better.
People aren't going into becoming carpenters and becoming plumbers and electricians. So there's this problem where there's a need for homes and there just aren't the people to build them.