A startup from San Antonio is opening its second hybrid mobile home dealership in West Texas this month. 

Braustin Homes has broken ground on its second hybrid mobile home dealership in Odessa and gives customers a unique chance to walk through units while interacting with sales representatives via video conference, as most of the company's sales are conducted virtually, according to Texas Real Estate Research Center (TRERC).

"It looks like a traditional dealership, in that there's nine physical models set up with the furniture and all this stuff to go physically walk through and see it, touch it, feel it to get an idea of what these homes look like," co-founder Alberto Piña told Texas Realty News. "What really makes it different is that none of our sales team is physically there. Keeping our team centralized really reduces our costs. It allows us to pass savings on to the end-user, the person actually buying the house."

Braustin’s first showroom opened in Atascosa last year and the company is planning a Panhandle debut with an Amarillo location, TRERC said. The newest Odessa location is at 3079 E. State Highway 80. 

Piña, who co-founded the company with his brother Jason Piña, is hopeful that the new dealership helps to solve an affordable-housing shortage in the area. 

"There's a school out that way (near the new location) that had 27 teachers living in hotels last year because they just can't get enough supply of affordable housing out there," Alberto Piña said. "So it's, you know, there's a problem to solve, we think we can solve it and it just made sense as the next place to go."

He said the hybrid format makes it easy and fun to buy a home at an affordable price. 

"Each of the homes has a video-chat portal inside the house," Piña said. "So you, as a customer, can get your questions answered in real-time as if we were there. It's one of those things that just happened to be safer because of COVID. But we really designed this and built it because it's more enjoyable. People don't really want to talk to salespeople nowaday; we totally get it." 

Having an in-person option to look at the homes helps gain customer confidence as well, he said. The brothers founded Braustin Homes in 2017 with the goal of bringing affordable manufactured homes to the area. 

On average, Braustin's prices are consistently $5,000 to $10,000 less than their competitors, Piña said.

"We just don't have the overhead that a traditional operator would have," Piña said. "But it's one of those things online now that there's a lot of scams, so we understand the hesitancy to believe that you truly can save $10,000 on something. And so seeing that we actually have a dealership, for a lot of our customers on the first one, it was really more about making sure we're not too good to be true than seeing the house that we had."