The launch of Wincrief Forest Products this summer will be a huge boost for area forestry mills and provided more than 20 jobs at start-up.
Kenora's Moncrief Construction and the Wabaseemoong (Whitedog) Independent First Nations are teaming up to make modular homes, now under construction, in a new joint venture enterprise.
July 3 is the scheduled target for the grand opening of Wincrief Forest Products.
The new venture is located in a 15,600-square-foot shop on Redditt Road, just north of Moncrief Construction's existing yard near the Highway 17 bypass.
The new joint venture is 51 per cent owned by Wabaseemoong First Nation and is starting with sales of ready-to-move housing for the local market.
“We're definitely building for the First Nations, but the target market is basically anyone who needs a home,” said Wincrief CEO Greg Moncrief.
“And who knows where it can go from there with winter roads or anyplace else you can drive to.”
Marvin McDonald of Wabaseemoong is Wincrief's CEO.
The $2.3 million investment in the new business is expected to supported with additional senior government funding dollars to be announced this summer.
The homes will be typical modular construction with two-by-six walls that can trucked in two halves to a site and set on a foundation.
The company has several different floor plans of three and four-bedrooms.
“Seems like each week there's another floor plan request. The designing has been a time-consuming job,” said Moncrief.
Moncrief declined comment on the range of prices, but said their office has been busy fielding calls from organizations looking for quotes.
Since they're built in a factory setting, “Our premise is they're built better and priced lower than homes built on site.”
The order book looks solid with eight homes pre-sold and with the first three modular homes moving out the shop's bay door in mid-June.
Moncrief said the Redditt Road shop will be a well-equipped with framing tables to construct these homes.
The new venture currently employs a dozen people, but the plan is to double the workforce in the next couple of months.
“Most of the people that work here are from the First Nation community. The training and apprenticeships programs are taking place.”
First-year projections are to produce between 25 and 30 homes.
The new venture is good news for area forest product mills.
Wincrief is committed to sourcing all the building materials for these homes from Kenora Forest Products, Weyerhaeuser and Domtar's Ear Falls sawmill.
Weyerhaeuser's Timberstand iLevel mill in Kenora is only running two days a week and Kenora Forest Products shut down indefinitely in February 2008 because of low demand for stud lumber in the U.S. Domtar temporarily idled its Ear Falls sawmill this spring and had extended its shutdown to July 6.
Moncrief Construction and its president Gerry Moncrief has been a successful family-owned business with close to 100 employees and construction contracts across Canada.
Founded in 1967 by Harold and Margaret Moncrief, the construction company began working on powerline construction projects for Bell Canada and Ontario Hydro installing pole and hydro lines, as well as the Department of Indian Affairs. They've since expanded to include road and bridge building, sub station and pipeline construction, subdivisions, civil engineering and mostly recently, a forest division
Branching out into partnership with the local First Nations with pre-manufactured homes builds on an already-successful relationship with another spinoff company, Moncrief Renewables. They harvest poles from the Kenora Forest which are sold to power companies in Ontario and Manitoba.
Moncrief credits Al Wilcox, the Ministry of Natural Resources' regional director in Thunder Bay, for organizing a delegation of area First Nations on a trip two years ago to Saskatchewan where they visited several Aboriginal business ventures including constructors of modular homes.
“He played a huge part in it in getting First Nations more active in business.”
A slumping North American economy and housing market isn't a big deterrent for this start up, said Moncrief.
“My faith is the economy is going to turn around. I don't believe the Kenora market has been as hit as hard as others in this country.”
