Overnight last month, a 2,500-square-foot home appeared from nowhere on a vacant piece of land in Alert Bay on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island.

This was not an elaborate magician’s trick, or a pop-up publicity stunt, but business as usual for a still-unusual business in Vancouver that preserves homes that need not be demolished.

The home came from a site in Delta. It was extracted from the floor joists, hoisted on to a flatbed, driven during the dark to a dock, and barged about 170 nautical miles on to ‘Namgis Nation territory.

The business in this business, Renewal Development, is one firm in a growing movement to keep houses from being scrapped. CEO Glyn Lewis describes it as a “prefab modular housing solution” that delivers a ready-to-occupy home for significantly less than what it would cost to build and be ready.

It comes at this business as one of only a few in North America from a batch of angles: as a home-preserver, as a shipper, as a demolisher, as a site-preparer, and as a renovator. It scouts proposals for redevelopment for worthy prospective homes to preserve and often wins the contract because it has homebuyers to fill their land with what would otherwise be landfill of home demolitions. The buyer pays for the costs associated with getting the homes out of the ground and into the ground, any preparation........

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