oWOW is an Oakland builder and developer run by co-founder and CEO Danny Haber, with Andy Ball as president. It puts development, preconstruction, construction and its own building products under one roof, and it’s made its name on mass timber and prefabricated housing in the Bay Area, including a 20-story mass plywood apartment tower in Oakland. Haber’s pitch is simple: cut cost per unit enough that housing pencils again. San Diego is the test case now. oWOW is the contractor on Father Joe’s Villages’ affordable project there, where switching to mass timber and off-site work dropped the cost from about $530,000 to $380,000 a unit. The company says it’ll finish by the end of 2027. Father Joe’s says March 2028.
Seven workers, fifteen minutes, one facade panel
oWOW publishes the kind of numbers most developers keep internal, and they are the most useful thing on its site. A crew of seven installs each panelized facade panel in under 15 minutes. An entire floor of superstructure goes up in hours rather than days. Both follow from the same decision: build the components in a factory and treat the site as assembly.
The structural system is specific. Mass plywood floor panels are point-supported on mass plywood columns, producing a superstructure the company describes as lightweight and highly efficient. Lighter structure carries through the whole design: reduced building weight means smaller foundations and smaller seismic resisting systems, which in the Bay Area is a material cost item rather than a footnote. The company states its timber comes from sustainably managed and local sources with low embodied carbon, and cites published comparative life cycle assessment research on mass timber and concrete buildings in the Pacific Northwest rather than asserting the number itself.
Prefabrication extends past structure and skin. MEP systems are installed into racks in the factory by multiple trades, reducing the time those trades spend on site. All mass timber components are robotically fabricated straight from digital models using CAD-CAM and CNC machining, then shipped just in time for installation. Coordination runs on federated BIM models before construction starts, with digital twins used to find constructability problems and to forecast cost and schedule.
Behind that sits a standardisation argument. A kit of parts and standardised units reduce design and engineering time, improve cost predictability and simplify supply chain management, and the company says standardised design lets it procure materials directly from factories worldwide, claiming savings of between 250 and 500 percent per line item.
The team is vertically integrated, with development, design and construction under one roof, led by president Andy Ball and chief executive and co-founder Danny Haber.
Coverage in Engineering News-Record, Structure Magazine, the San Francisco Business Times, KTVU and the San Francisco Chronicle has focused on 1510 Webster Street in Oakland and a project at 960 Howard Street in San Francisco, and the company’s work featured among WoodWorks’ 2023 Wood Design Award winners. Sources: owow.com homepage, About and Approach pages.
