In this article, we interviewed Silas DeVries and Joseph Barton of De Vries Technologies aka DEV Tech. DEV technology makes buildings more easily upgradeable, replaceable, and fixable.  This is accomplished by using custom hardware developed with 3D Printing Technology alongside simple open-source software.

SC Works: Tell us about you and your background

Silas DeVries: My name is Silas. I grew up in Hollister, California and moved up to Sacramento and Folsom after high school. I went to college for real estate and business because I wanted to start buying rental properties and make a living off residual income. While I was doing that, I was working in restaurants saving up money. I started buying more and more rental properties – four to be exact. I realized that what I was doing already –  buying rental houses – was what I was going to college for. So I stopped college and went full time into real estate. I then had this crazy idea that I could reinvent the home, how it works, how to maintain it, etc. So I flipped all four of my rental houses and turned them into a product. That's kind of where I'm at now – making a company out of it.

SC Works: Joseph, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Joseph Barton: I've lived in Santa Cruz since 1982 in the fourth grade, and grew up in a family that did construction, property maintenance – we would take jobs no one else wanted. I found myself putting myself through college, managing apartments and just doing odds and ends. I graduated and went into accounting and sales, running a full-time salesforce.  I've been in the tech industry selling for 25 years, working in companies like Seagate, Polycom, Plantronics, and HP.

SC Works: What were the problems you saw that inspired your company?

Joseph Barton: 90% of our family construction projects were remodels. We saw unnecessary costs.  For example, framing a wall is not expensive.  But when there is damage inside the wall – such as a water leak – opening and closing a wall gets pretty expensive. Not to mention you've got to move everything out of the house. And so, as Silas and I started looking at this. What really caught my attention was realizing that Silas wasn’t proposing just to reinvent the house, it's actually to take things that currently exist, and make them easier for the average homeowner.  For example, things like your electricity bill going up, and not knowing why.  It could be that you are using more electricity, or maybe your appliances are old and broken.  We are taking some of the traditional methods of building, and combining them with smart home technology. It's going to make it more affordable for people to install at the start, more affordable for them to run their home, and more affordable to maintain. So I'm really excited because a lot of what we've been working on actually solves the problems I have experienced for the past 25 years. 

Silas Devries: Agreed.  If we look at the problem we're trying to solve, I'd say it's actually three (3) problems. The first is the overall cost of construction. The second is the cost of maintenance. The third is really just the living usability. 

Looking at the first problem, we all know building costs are going up higher and higher. Our solution is faster to build and maintain because the utilities (water, plumbing, electricity, gas, sewer) are not hidden inside a wall. Our solution places utilities behind accessible crown molding, or baseboard. It is faster, easier, and more economical to install.  And maintenance, repairs, and upgrades are also faster, easier, less expensive, and much less intrusive.  

Joseph Barton: Think about our leaking water pipe example. You have to tear a wall and floor apart just to find the leak. Three weeks ago, there was a leak in an apartment building, and we had to cut out a quarter of the ceiling because it was wet. It took us less than 20 minutes to fix the pipe that was broken. It took us 6 hours to repair the ceiling. You see this kind of cost of maintenance, especially in commercial properties, rentals businesses, airbnb, like investment properties, where maintenance is such an unknown in such a big factor. Take our solution, the entire project would have taken less than 1 hour.  Imagine if your car’s engine were only accessible by cutting through the body and frame.  That is the problem we are solving.

Silas DeVries: Our app will let you know when and why your utilities are going up. For a remote homeowner or if you have multiple properties, our predictive technology tells you there's a problem before the damage costs mount.

SC Works: Who or what is your ideal customer?

Silas DeVries: I don't have an ideal customer because its designed for everyone. Just like I would argue, the iPhone or a Tesla doesn't have an ideal customer. I want to bring for the first time to the housing industry a platform in which homes operate and are maintained in an infinite open source inspired ecosystem. Giving more power to homeowners with a right to repair their own property. A simpler standard that makes owning a House simpler and easier for the average person. And a company who stands behind this cause and is accountable for the systems running in your home. Unlike EVERY other home in the world. There needs to be a first party solution to repair, upgrade or replace components.

SC Works: There's a lot of tiny homes being built these days. Any reason why it wouldn't work there?

Silas DeVries: Yes, it would work there. When I started with this idea, I wanted to make it widely applicable. With our solutions, everything can be plug-and-play. Kind of like a computer. There's lots of different manufacturers who make motherboards, but they all have universal solutions for say, a PCI slot, a USB, Type A and all that. The operating system recognizes the parts. I want to apply that kind of way of thinking to the home. But right now it's not standard. You have to glue and staple and nail and cut pieces of wood a certain way to fit houses and kind of custom tailor each individual house. You can't just go buy a kitchen at Home Depot and screw it in and sell it in.

SC Works: What are your challenges? For example, residential house inspectors amenable to your new solutions?

Silas DeVries: I've done four of my own houses and had each one inspected, sometimes more than once.  The code and the property inspections all passed in flying colors. With the last two houses, the inspectors thought it was so cool that they continued to ask questions long after their scheduled appointment.  Ideally, I would like to get this whole package approved in Sacramento. Kind of like security systems: pre-approved packages that can be retrofitted into any house. 

Joseph Barton: Everything we do must comply with UI code. What's interesting about our surface mount solution is that nothing is hidden from the inspectors.Their ability to inspect our work at any point in time is actually fully transparent. 

SC Works: Where do you guys see yourself in a couple of years? How do you scale your business?

Silas DeVries: Good question. This whole model from start to finish is meant to be scaled. It'd be very hard to do on a small scale, one or two at a time, a couple at a time. And so just like the house and all the pieces of it are all interchangeable and stuff, how we scale the business is similar. Our plan is to open regional shops called nodes. The homes are called NEAT houses, and the nodes will be called NEAT nodes. That node will install our system into houses and then also provide service and upgrades to all our clients that have our houses in the city. Next, we'll go city by city installing more neat nodes, with technicians  for installing more systems, converting more houses into NEAT houses and servicing more clients. And as demand grows, more nodes go into those regions that have higher demand. Later we will open up a distribution center, a “Mother node”, which will distribute all of our upgrade packages, our install kits, manage all our software and our cloud services to all the houses. We'll scale across the country in regions that really can benefit from our system. And so by year five, we should be doing 2,400 house conversions a year. 

SC Works: Technicians need to be trained by you? 

Joseph Barton: Yes, because we have a process and a way of doing things. But not everything we're doing is reinventing the wheel. We put wire inside of the surface mount. So if you're an electrician, it's not going to be foreign to you. The outlets that we use are going to be a little different because there will be some smart technology. The quick releases that we're going to put on the AquaPEX is going to be a little different because we're looking for standardization and modularization. But if you're a skilled craftsman, you're going to see how this works. I've been doing this for 25 years as far as, like, doing remodels, and nothing that Silas is talking about is that hard. And in fact, we went to a construction crew of nine and we showed them what we're doing, and we think that we could be able to actually bring them on probably after the first install. We think by the end of the first install, they could be certified to repeat the process.

SC Works: Short term, what are the next steps?

Silas DeVries: To get this ball rolling, we need seed investment. We need investment to get the first node opened up with 2-3 technicians, then get all the software as we do the next two houses. We aim to prove ourselves to whoever can help us. 

Joseph Barton: We've already done four houses. We know how to do it. We're actually writing up a commission contract right now to start actively pursuing installs. We will use some contract sales people, mostly realtors, who will receive a commission. But our goal is to start a pipeline of installs. We have a team that's agreed, like I said, a group of contractors to start working with us on installs. And we just need to find more people who want to learn and install. Funding would make it a lot easier, a lot faster. Funding, more technicians and installs, would enable us to build parts at a larger scale. 

SC Works: Before we wrap it up, is there anything else that you want to talk about? Anything else?

Joseph Barton: Sustainability. We're trying to future proof home costs. In addition to lower build costs, and reduce maintenance costs, you reduce landfill. 25% of landfill is from home construction and remodeling waste. As new solutions become available for electricity, gas, whatever it is, you will be able to disconnect the old, and easily connect the new. You get the rebate and you're happy because you're doing the right thing and your house is future proof.