Watch crane drop a second home into Sacramento backyard, highlighting soaring ADU demand

Highlighting an increase in the demand for ADUs, a large crane on Thursday lifted a prefabricated, one-bedroom house off a neighborhood street, swung it over a tall tree and dropped it into the backyard of a Sacramento home.

The job took less than 10 minutes.

Demand for ADUs, or accessory dwelling units, has increased 20-fold in California since 2016, according to Mike McNamara, CEO of Samara, the Redwood City-based company that sold, manufactured and delivered the 540-square-foot secondary home to the property in South Land Park.

In Sacramento, the number of ADU permits issued has skyrocketed to 246 in 2023 from 30 in 2018, an increase of more than 700%, according to the city of Sacramento. Of all housing permits issued by the city in 2023, ADUs accounted for 9.45% of them, according to the city, up from 2020 when ADU permits accounted for only about 2% of all housing units that year.

McNamara and billionaire Joe Gebbia, who founded Airbnb, launched Samara as an independent company in 2022 with $41 million in funding. Other leading investors included venture capital firm Thrive Capital and Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky. Samara began as a research and development team within Airbnb.

ADUs making sense

Advocates for ADUs, also called granny flats or in-law units, say the homes make sense because more people are working from home, more families are considering multigenerational living situations and the state is in need of more housing.

“One in four permits in the Los Angeles/Southern California area are for an ADU,” Gebbia said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee. “One in seven housing permits in the Bay Area is for an ADU. So this is an idea that’s become very popular for a variety of reasons of why people get an ADU.

“It’s to house family, parents getting older, kids coming home from college, to earn income, to rent out medium to long term, or it’s a place to use for personal use, for work from home or a yoga studio or writer’s nook — for all those things over the course of ownership.”

On Thursday, a section of 13th Street was blocked off so the ADU could be hoisted by crane and eased onto a slab foundation in the backyard. Despite persistent light rain, dozens of neighbors came out to see the spectacular sight of what amounted to a flying house. Samara even brought in a taco truck for the event.

The homeowners, who were not available for an interview, will use the unit for relatives who frequently stay with them. The unit is being adapted to make it accessible for people with disabilities; for example, a ramp will be installed after the unit is bolted to the foundation. It’s the first time Samara has delivered one of its ADUs to a Sacramento location.

Samara handles everything needed to get their backyard homes up and running, from permits to site preparation to installation. Buyers hardly need to lift a finger, except to choose options and colors.

Nearly everything done for the homebuyer

For the guest house that was just craned in, utility connections for water, wastewater and electricity were already dug and put in place. The preparation is included in the overall price of a unit.

“By the way, none of this the homeowner had to figure out on their own,” Gebbia said. “ We decided early on at Samara that we want to provide an amazing customer experience and really handle everything, so that a customer just has to go to (the Samara website), customize, put in their colors and options, and then we handle literally everything else.”

Configuration options and starting costs, according to samara.com, for various models are:

▪ A 420-square-foot studio: $269,000

▪ A 540-square-foot, one-bedroom home: $284,000

▪ A 690-square-foot, two-bedroom residence: $324,000.

“It’s the unit plus everything else: the permitting utility hookups, the soil samples, the 100-point checklist that most homeowners aren’t necessarily experts in,” Gebbia said. “And so we said, let’s take all that friction off their plate and we’ll handle that part so that they just get the delivery at the end.”

The median listing price of a home in Sacramento is $479,500, according to Realtor.com.

Samara has put a strong focus on the manufacturing and supply chain processes to enable on-site construction in as few as 30 days, according to the company.

Samara, which employs 60 people, recently acquired a 150,000-square-foot factory in Mexicali, Mexico, to bring the manufacturing of its units completely in-house. Once the factory is fully up and running, it will be able to churn out 1,000 ADUs per year, according to the company.

Some California cities have seen even more interest in ADUs than Sacramento. Statewide, ADU development grew from about 1,000 ADUs permitted in 2016 to more than 24,000 in 2022, accounting for about 19% of new housing permits, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. In Los Angeles, ADUs rose to more than 7,000 permits issued in 2022 from fewer than 100 in 2016, or about 30% of all new units in the city.

Pro-ADU regulations put in place

“We’re excited about where we’re going,” McNamara said. “Around 2016, the Legislature in California started making very pro-ADU rules, laws, regulations, to enable ADUs to be put in very easily. And since 2016 to now, there’s been literally about a 20-times increase in permits in California, so the favorable regulations have come simultaneously with a huge amount of growth. It’s a real shown government in action to be able to solve some of the housing problems and some of the housing crisis.”

Assemblyman Kevin McCarty of Sacramento, who’s built two ADUs on his property in the past 15 years using traditional construction methods, stopped by the neighborhood to see the unit airlifted into the backyard.

“I’m excited to see here that it’s (installed) in one day — ours did not take one day,” McCarty, who is running for mayor of Sacramento, said. “This is a testament of what we’ve done here in California, starting with Governor Brown, now with Governor Newsom. We signed over a dozen bills to make these easier (to build). There’s been over 60,000 ADUs built in the last two years here in California, and we want to do many more here in our capital city.”

The Samara unit is built with insulated metal panels on the outside and two-by-six steel framing.

“The frame construction is extremely strong,” McNamara said. “This thing is built to last a hundred years. This is meant to appreciate. As your house appreciates in equity, this is meant to appreciate right along with it. And we made them beautiful ... designed it to be beautiful.”