As our region continues to grapple with a deep housing affordability crisis, the HDC has launched the Offsite Feasibility Agent at its Offsite Construction Symposium, held today at the University of Washington. Built by our Offsite Construction Task Force on the Rhizar platform, the agent answers a question that has historically taken developers months of phone calls to settle: “which regional offsite building systems could build this project?” The tool is free for HDC members and is the first working piece of the digital feasibility platform called for in the HDC Offsite Construction Action Plan released this same morning.
Offsite construction allows for components of a building to be constructed offsite in a factory setting before being transported to the work site where they are rapidly assembled, allowing for more affordable, standardized construction at a substantially quicker pace. But this standardization comes with its own challenges; different offsite construction methods, or builders, may not be a good match with specific parcels of land. The process of evaluating parcels for offsite construction feasibility has historically been slow and expensive, and most projects never get tested at all.
The Offsite Feasibility Agent transforms this evaluation step. A developer describes the project in plain language—address, unit count, program, stories, funding, timeline. In response, the agent asks the questions that an expert would ask, labels assumptions, and returns a Stage-1 read: which regional building systems do or do not plausibly fit and why, alongside the questions the developer will have to answer, and who to contact. Every answer shows its sources and their dates. A clear no in minutes is worth as much as a promising yes: either way, the developer knows which manufacturers to call instead of spending months finding out.
The agent is constructed from the knowledge of HDC’s own members. The Offsite Construction Task Force (OCTF) developed a feasibility checklist and worked with five regional manufacturers who each completed a one-hour intake centered on what they build, their capacity and reach, and what they need from developers. Further testing was performed by developers on the OCTF Land Committee, who tested the agent against their own projects before launch.
“Developers and manufacturers each hold the other’s answers, and until now the only way to trade was weeks or months of emails and phone calls. HDC’s task force and four manufacturers put that knowledge into an agent so any member can screen a real project in minutes. That is the whole idea behind Rhizar. AI is powerful technology, and it should be used for good purposes — housing supply and affordability first among them. We’re building Rhizar to lower the cost of housing development by putting the power of AI in the industry’s hands and turning its expertise into shared intelligence.”
Aaron Holm, CEO of Rhizar
Built by HDC on the Rhizar platform, HDC owns the agent and the knowledge behind it, and will keep adding to and improving it. The agent is private by design, and what members contribute will never be used to train public AI models. The Offsite Feasibility Agent is designed to inform and supplement expert work, not replace it, and nothing provided by the agent is a quote or a commitment from any manufacturer.
