This home on Peoples Drive is by Braustin Homes. The company was founded by brothers Alberto and Jason Pina.While Braustin Homes, a locally based company that sells modular housing, was founded in 2017, it seems tailored to a post-pandemic world.
Apart from the pandemic, 2020 was a turning point for Braustin. In the fall of that year, it raised $1.9 million in a seed round, accepting investments from the likes of Graham Weston and Rackspace Technology Inc. co-founder Pat Condon in exchange for equity stakes in the company. Last month, Braustin launched a financial technology, or fintech, product that Piña expects to propel its growth. Named PorchPass, it offers financing to prospective buyers of manufactured homes to help them line up the land and do the site work necessary for installing a home. Often, lenders won’t issue mortgages until that work is done, so it helps smooth out the process, Piña said.
Piña recently sat with the Express-News to discuss the quality of manufactured homes, how the industry has changed and how rising housing costs have impacted demand. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.Jason and I went to Geekdom because it was a cheap place to work. It had free internet, free printers. We started meeting folks that write code or just think different than what we’d been exposed to, coming up in the industry. There’s always new ideas.