Logic Founder, Jason Van Nest, reflects on chairing the Business Strategy track and what it signals for Configure-to-Order housing.
This month, I returned to Advancing PreFab for my second year of service as a Track Chair (an industry role that’s equal parts moderation, synthesis, and real-time market research). Last year, I chaired the BIM track. This year, I chaired Track 7: Business Strategy, convening two days of candid discussions on how prefab and offsite firms actually operate: how they win work, manage risk, justify capital investment, and attempt to scale.
At Logic Building Systems, we probably treat conferences differently than most startups do. We don’t go unless paid to present and promote. And we go to study what’s becoming true: what leaders are admitting, what they’re struggling to say, and which business practices are starting to show up repeatedly across firms. Serving as Track Chair placed me in a rare vantage point. I get to listen to presenters, watch executive audiences react, and testing ideas in real time through facilitated questions.
For investors trying to understand where housing delivery models are headed, this is about understanding where first-mover advantage will emerge. Advancing PreFab 2026 offered a clear signal: the industry is straining against Engineer-to-Order constraints, and an increasing share of leaders are searching for a more product-like marketplace structure.
What the Track Chair signals to investors.
Being asked to chair a track twice is a meaningful indicator. It reflects increasing trust and visibility in a field that is historically skeptical of new frameworks. But more importantly, it’s hands-on research performed in public: you are exposed to the industry’s best presenters, most candid executive audiences, and the unfiltered tension between what people want to be true and what their operating systems can currently support.
This is an environment where the housing market is impatient with incremental improvement. Investors don’t need another “good prefab company.” They need a clear view of where the market structure is moving. I remain convinced that it is headed towards repeatable product systems, shorter cycle times, standardized interfaces, and commercial terms that actually fit product-like scopes.
Track 7 was effectively a live test of that thesis.
The key shift: BIM maturity is not the same as manufacturing maturity
In 2025, my track lens was BIM. This year, it was business strategy. That change mirrored a bigger shift in my own understanding:
- BIM is an ETO tool. It is highly effective inside service-based delivery, where each project is treated as a new episode requiring extensive coordination.
- Manufacturing logic is a different animal. In manufacturing, you explicitly manage assembly tiers… each with defined completeness, allowable variability, and inspection regimes. You manage closure states deliberately.
Offsite construction aspires to the benefits of manufacturing, but much of the industry still operates as enhanced job shops delivering one-off scopes. When you’re designing “products” for repeat deployment across many buildings and jurisdictions, you can’t rely on a single inspector, a single project team, or ad hoc field judgment as the governing system. The product definition must be clearer, more enforceable, and more repeatable.
From an investor perspective, this is a crucial point: the scaling bottleneck is not simply production capacity. It’s business model architecture. Startups need a compelling narrative of how products are defined, sold, integrated, and warranted inside a fragmented industry.
What I heard in the room: the ETO pain is well-known — and people are ready for alternatives
In Track 7, many presenters were still operating almost entirely within an Engineer-to-Order frame, so the admissions were familiar:
- the need to lock scope early
- the need to protect firms from project partners who don’t understand prefab risk
- the scramble to keep drawings ahead of production
- the fatigue of constant revision cycles and bespoke coordination
But the more important signal was not the pain itself. It was what happened when we tested whether leaders are building the infrastructure for a different model.
At one point, I asked the room: “How many of you are drafting a product catalog for customers?” About a third of the hands went up.
That’s a market signal: executives want the advantages of being shopped, specified, and procured like products. The seek a release from the constant renegotiations, contracts, and maintenance of their service-based transactions.
Then I asked the only logical follow-up question: what’s taking so long? The candid answer from non-presenters (i.e. customers, GCs, and other partners) was that the broader marketplace isn’t fully ready because the surrounding system hasn’t shifted. Some attendees were visibly frustrated that “catalogs” and the business mechanics behind them weren’t a deeper topic.
Investors should pay attention to that frustration. Frustration is often a leading indicator of a market gap: demand is forming faster than the supply-side infrastructure required to satisfy it.
“One team” isn’t enough
Conference organizers emphasized “one-team culture” and change management. That focus is understandable. But it also reflects a legacy ETO posture: manage coordination, manage blame cycles, manage alignment.
Those legacy have their use, but they are not sufficient to unlock product-like scalability. Track 7 reinforced what we believe at Logic: the industry needs equal attention on two under-discussed constraints that shape product marketplaces:
- Customers: In product marketplaces, customers choose from constrained options and shop for features; they are not co-authors of bespoke scope.
- Installation management: Installation is not an afterthought; it is a disciplined integration operation between pre-defined systems, with known interfaces, tolerances, and sequencing.
If you want a product marketplace, you can’t treat installation as improvised field work and still expect repeatability at scale. This is where many offsite ambitions quietly fail.
Capex and ROI: firms are trapped between two worlds
The agenda included sessions on justifying facilities, equipment, and expansion. The pattern I observed is a bind that will be familiar to investors:
Most firms’ operating DNA is Engineer-to-Order. Their revenue model, staffing, project controls, and risk posture all depend on it. In a rational world, they’d evolve cautiously, piloting one “next-model” project per year, learning gradually.
But the ETO→CTO transition behaves more like a threshold. Partial adoption can leave firms paying the overhead of both systems without capturing the full benefits of either. That’s why capex decisions feel paralyzing: the transformation is interdependent across process, contracts, customer expectations, installation discipline, and supply chain design.
This is exactly the kind of environment where startups can create asymmetric value, by building enabling infrastructure that incumbents can’t easily justify building while still trapped in legacy revenue streams.
The most important signal: the industry is organizing faster than expected
The biggest surprise this year was speed. I expected interest. I did not expect how quickly attendees are forming a shared appetite for new market structures—how explicitly people are looking for relief from the service treadmill, and how willing they are to explore new ways of selling, buying, and integrating offsite scopes.
That matters for investors: it suggests the market is moving from “innovation curiosity” to “business-model urgency.”
How this connects to Logic—and where first-mover advantage may come from
At Logic Building Systems, we’re building toward a Configure-to-Order housing marketplace. That phrase can sound abstract until you see what the industry is already trying to do:
- catalogs that let customers shop constrained options
- product definitions that travel across jurisdictions
- predictable integration methods on site
- interoperable interfaces that enable ecosystem participation
- commercial terms that fit product-like scopes rather than bespoke services
Advancing PreFab 2026 confirmed something we care about deeply: many firms want this future, but few can build the full stack alone, especially inside the constraints of legacy delivery.
Logic’s thesis is that first-mover advantage will accrue to organizations that build the enabling infrastructure early. The next wave of demand will be served through product systems rather than heroic project management.