MOULTRIE — The Moultrie-Colquitt County Economic Development Authority voted Wednesday to pay Destiny Industries’ interest on its financing for one year.

Estimates are now that the EDA would pay about $85,000 to facilitate the deal with Oakwood Homes creditors.

Bill and Donnie Edwards are financing the deal through tax-exempt industrial revenue bonds issued through the EDA. The development authority has aided other incoming industries similarly, but the Destiny deal will cost much less — an estimated $500 per job expense, EDA Executive Director Darrell Moore said.

The EDA is comfortable becoming a financing conduit for Destiny because board members know the character and integrity of the Edwards, General Manager Jerry Brooks and the management team, EDA Chair Jimmy Jeter said.

“We have great confidence in their ability to succeed, and we have great confidence that these jobs they create will be very stable jobs. The reopening of this plant will give our community a great boost! What an exciting day this is for the people of Moultrie and Colquitt County,” Jeter said.

The Edwards commended the EDA (especially Moore), the city and the county for bending over backwards to revive Destiny and put people back to work.

“It’s hard work building homes. That’s as easy as you can get it,” Destiny Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bill Edwards said, thumbing to the state-of-the-art former Oakwood facility. “It’s cool, it’s safe, everything that can be automated has been. That is the culmination of looking at 27 plants and looking at best practices.”

At start up, Destiny will develop and build two to three floor plans aimed at the middle-class home buyers in markets within a 250-mile radius of the factory.

Initially, the new Destiny will produce five houses per week and eventually grow to 20 per week, built to acceptable state and local building codes of Georgia, Florida, Alabama and South Carolina. The product line will feature 7/12 roof pitches, nine-foot ceilings, 100 percent tape and textured drywall interiors and any of the features found in site-built construction.

Ninety percent of the house will be manufactured at the plant, Destiny will offer crews that can assemble and finish the house in generally a day and a half, Bill Edwards said.

Destiny’s houses are indistinguishable from site-built homes and are actually stronger, he said.

“When you think about it, we build a home that can go down the road at 60 miles per hour. It’ll be picked up by a crane and set, and it won’t even crack the sheet rock inside,” he said.

The Edwards aren’t blind to the slump in the manufactured housing industry. They see, instead, an opportunity with modular, off-site housing. It attracts customers with better credit, and there are fewer zoning restrictions

“Typical mobile homes like those that were built in Moultrie by Oakwood are important in providing affordable home ownership to a substantial but limited segment of the marketplace,” said Bob Qurnell, executive vice president for sales and marketing. But my personal experience over the last several years convinced me that there was a larger population that was under-served by the housing industry. That segment is the middle class home buyer who can afford a more expensive home with more amenities than a HUD-code manufactured home, but that finds it difficult to find a new site-built home within their budget.”

Ironically, the offsite home building industry has burgeoned along with the the national site-built housing industry as the mobile home industry has foundered, Bill Edwards said. Modular construction passed mobile home construction in 2002.

“Because we can do things in a factory more efficiently than a site builder can do, we can come to market with a per square foot cost that is below site-built but equal in quality,” he said.