Cresco’s Amanée Mousavi and Farhang Fotovat on a 38-unit rental townhome project that cut their schedule to a third, barely touched their own trades, and made the case that offsite construction is the only arithmetic that works when the region’s skilled workforce can’t keep up with its population.
Hossein Mousavi left Iran after the revolution, studied science at St. Francis Xavier, drove a taxi, and stumbled sideways into construction. By 2006, the company he founded in 1989 — Cresco Developments Limited — was buying 1,300 acres in Bedford West that would eventually become The Parks of West Bedford, one of the largest planned communities in Nova Scotia. More than thirty years in, his daughter Amanée runs sales and marketing; his son-in-law Farhang Fotovat manages commercial construction development; and the family is formalizing the handover with a governance structure they say they couldn’t have built without a membership association most builders haven’t heard of.
This episode of the Atlantic Construction Podcast is two stories woven together: a primer on a specific modular construction project, and a candid conversation about what it actually takes to pass a family company to the next generation without it breaking in half. Both threads are worth following.
The problem that sent them to offsite: Halifax is growing faster than its trades base
Farhang Fotovat came to Canada in 2005 on a student visa, switched from Saint Mary’s University business to NSCC’s two-year construction administration technology program — a program he calls one of the best entry paths into the industry — and worked his way up through junior site supervisor, estimator, and formwork crew lead before joining Cresco in 2013. By the time the Halifax rental market started heating up, he was the one asking a question that didn’t have a comfortable answer: if the city keeps growing and the skilled trades pool keeps shrinking, how does anyone double the build rate?
Cresco’s direct staff in home construction runs at around six people. Their real capacity comes from a loyal network of 200 to 250 tradespeople who move across projects. Farhang describes them plainly: “we always when we look at them we look at them as partners”. That model works for the volume they’ve been doing. It doesn’t obviously scale if you need to build twice as many homes with the same pool of electricians and plumbers.
The answer, in this episode, is a 38-unit modular rental townhome project with The Shaw Group — factory-built at Prestige Homes’ plant in Sussex, New Brunswick, trucked to Halifax in modules maxing out at 16 feet wide (the highway limit), and craned into five blocks a day.
What craning in five blocks a day actually looks like
Each townhome comes off the Prestige Homes assembly line as a module — built indoors, on a factory floor, in a climate-controlled building in Sussex. The units are designed to fit within the transport envelope: “16 foot wide that's the 16 foot is the max that they can't carry it”. That constraint sets the entire design envelope. Once the foundation is ready in Halifax, the modules arrive by truck and a crane sets five blocks a day. The site connection work — foundations, hookups, finishing — is a fraction of a conventional stick-build.
The schedule compression is the headline. Where a conventional multi-unit build might take a full construction season, modular cut it to “a third of the time”. The winter advantage is structural: the factory doesn’t stop when it snows. Farhang notes that the Prestige Homes plant “don't lose any time in winter time” — in Atlantic Canada, where weather can eat weeks off a schedule, that’s a real number, not a marketing claim.
The other gain is on the trades side. The whole point of factory-building is that the rough-in is done before the unit reaches the site. As Farhang puts it: “we're not using our own trades to build these units these are already built in manufacturing”. The 200-person trade network stays on other Cresco work. The modular project barely touches them.
The missing middle and what the market actually wanted
The 38 rental townhomes at this project are sub-2,000 square feet — smaller than a detached home, more affordable than a purpose-built apartment. Farhang describes the product category directly: “missing middle is that that part between apartment building and home construction”. Halifax had apartments going up. Halifax had single-family homes selling fast. The gap between them — affordable, rental, multi-unit, low-rise — was thin.
The market absorbed the units fast. That confirmed the product thesis, and Cresco didn’t stop iterating after phase one. Between phases, the team moved hot water tanks, HRVs, and electrical panels into each individual unit. The logic: “we move the hot water tank to the second floor” — and when you eliminate the shared basement mechanical room, you slash the basement plumbing and wiring runs that Cresco’s own trades would otherwise have to run on site. Phase three is bungalow townhomes on crawl spaces, needing minimal site connection. Each phase got leaner.
Running a site through COVID — the staggered-shift answer
The modular project came alongside Cresco’s conventional multi-unit work. When COVID hit in spring 2020, the Nova Scotia construction industry negotiated collectively with the provincial government to stay open — “they were very successful negotiating with the government with provincial government” — and then had to figure out how to actually do it.
Farhang’s answer on a multi-unit site was three staggered shifts: 7 to 3, 3 to 9, and overnight. “i had like three different shifts basically to separate people from each other”. One crew occupies a unit; the next crew doesn’t enter until the first is gone. Production slowed. The site stayed open. That’s the trade he made — and, in retrospect, the right one.
Two families, one governance structure, and why they needed outside help
Cresco was co-founded by Hossein Mousavi, with Taleb Abedali joining in 1994. Two founding families, three decades of shared equity, and a succession question that can’t be answered inside the building because everyone inside the building has a stake in the answer.
Amanée has been a member of Family Business Atlantic since 2010 and took on the role of president. She describes the peer groups at the heart of the organization in a way that tracks with what a lot of construction operators eventually figure out on their own, usually too late: “a peer group is like a mini board of directors it's a confidential space”. Seven peer groups, each meeting monthly, each governed by confidentiality so that a member can bring the problem they actually have — not the sanitized version. Members in the construction and trades world include Conrad Brothers, the Hardman Group, Blunden Construction, Barrett Lumber, and Maple Leaf Homes. Membership covers the whole company for $500 a year.
For Cresco’s succession, the value was specific and traceable. Amanée’s FBA network connected Cresco with Dr. Margaret Humphries of Watermark Partners, a Halifax-area consulting firm that guides family-business succession. “through the connections that i've made at family business atlantic we were able to hire a family business advisor”. That advisor helped Cresco build the formal infrastructure: a joint family council, a shareholders council, written policies on shareholder expectations, family compensation philosophy, and conflict resolution. The blunt summary: “in order for cresco to move to the next generation successfully there has to be governance”. Policies on paper before the handover, not improvised during it.
The other piece of the succession architecture is strong non-family management — people who run the day-to-day operations well enough that the owning families can spend their time on governance and growth decisions rather than job site logistics. The framing Amanée uses: “not really working in the day-to-day business but working on the business”. For a second-generation family company in a hot regional market, getting there requires hiring above the comfort level and then actually letting go.
The companies behind this project
Five organizations are central to this episode — and worth knowing if you’re working through similar problems in Atlantic Canada.
Cresco Developments Limited is the integrated family-owned firm that developed, owns, and operates the rental townhomes. Beyond this project, they build low-rise residential homes, develop master-planned communities (including The Parks of West Bedford), and operate commercial and investment properties in the Halifax region. Three decades of HRM construction in one company.
Prestige Homes — formally M.M.H. Prestige Homes Inc., a division of The Shaw Group — is the factory behind the units. Their Sussex, New Brunswick plant produces modular homes from mini-homes and cottages through multi-storey and multi-unit builds, distributed through authorized retailers across Atlantic Canada and Maine. If your project has the volume to make factory delivery viable, this is the regional manufacturer that has already done it.
The Shaw Group Limited is the parent organization — a multi-generational Nova Scotia company whose divisions include Shaw Brick, Shaw Precast Solutions, Shaw Resources, and the land developer Clayton Developments. Cresco’s modular townhome project was its first with The Shaw Group, and the partnership worked.
Family Business Atlantic is the not-for-profit that connected Cresco to their succession advisor and to the peer groups that function as a standing sounding board for problems you can’t table internally. If you run a family-owned construction or trades company in Atlantic Canada, the $500/year membership covers the whole company and the entire programming calendar. PEI expansion launched in May 2021 — they’re actively growing the network.
Watermark Partners is the Halifax-area management consulting firm that provided Cresco’s family-business advisor, Dr. Margaret Humphries. Their practice covers organizational change, executive coaching, and family-business succession planning.
Hossein Mousavi drove a cab in Nova Scotia before he picked up a hammer. Thirty-five years later, the company he built is craning factory-built townhomes into place five blocks at a time and constructing the governance architecture to make sure the next generation can run it without him in the room. The modular math — a third of the schedule, no winter downtime, the company’s own trades barely touched — is the operational answer to a trades shortage that isn’t going away. The governance work is the answer to a different problem: the one that shows up when two families and decades of shared equity reach the handover moment without a written policy in place. Cresco is working both at once. That’s the episode.
Guests: Amanée Mousavi (sales and marketing, Cresco Developments; president, Family Business Atlantic) and Farhang Fotovat (commercial construction development manager, Cresco Developments). Episode 6 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode.