Homes are not getting cheaper or necessarily easier to insure.
This year, the median household income for homebuyers jumped to $107,000 from $88,000 last year. according to the National Association of Realtors. The volume of homes for sale in the US reached register a minimummeanwhile, and shows no signs of recovery.
Now, one could argue that rising prices and the interrelated decline in housing supply are positive trends, in fact, because they could push families toward more sustainable and environmentally friendly alternatives. Studies show that single-family suburbs contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, while discouraging New affordable housing.
But startups like BotBuilt Make the case that potential homebuyers can also have their cake and eat it by embracing technology to reduce the cost (and mitigate the negative impacts) of home construction.
BotBuilt is the brainchild of Brent Wadas, Colin Devine, and robotics engineer Barrett Ames. Founded in 2020, the company aims to create a robotic system that can capture a construction blueprint, translate that plan into a series of machine commands, and send those commands to the aforementioned system.
What inspired the co-founders to tackle home building? Personal experience, according to Ames. While a graduate student at Duke, Ames and his wife purchased a fixer-upper near the university campus and recruited friends and family to help renovate the house. Throughout the remodel, Ames says he learned a lot about the challenges (and patterns) of construction.
“The housing industry is facing a huge housing shortage and builders know they have to keep building as many homes as possible to make up for years of underbuilding,” Ames told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Due to rising interest rates, many people do not want to leave their current homes and the associated fees, further increasing demand for new homes.”
Now, the system envisioned by BotBuilt does not build houses from scratch. Instead, it focuses on a specific part of the “flow” of home construction: frame construction.
BotBuilt's robotics join together wall panels, floor joists and ceiling joists, several of the main structural components of homes. The company's system, which apparently costs less than $1 an hour to operate, can be reprogrammed to build “completely” different frame designs for homes relatively quickly, Ames says.
Image credits: BotBuilt
“The flexibility of our robotic systems is our… big advantage,” Ames said. “Previous attempts to use robots to innovate construction have relied heavily on strict automation, meaning robots are programmed to perform the same task over and over again. “This approach works well for repetitive tasks like building cars, but it is not suitable for the construction industry, where there is a wide variety of designs.”
By automating the framing step, Ames' theory is that the pace of home construction can be dramatically accelerated while reducing costs.
Typically, the structure of the house costs $7 to $16 per square foot, including $4 to $10 in framing labor costs. At best, framing takes about a month, but factors such as bad weather can delay things, as can labor shortages. technology-is-revolutionizing-the-industry-and-creating-a-better-future/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20National%20Association,industry%20struggles%20to%20keep%20up.”>According According to the National Association of Home Builders, more than 55% of single-family home builders reported a shortage of skilled labor across all home construction sectors, including home builders, in 2021.
BotBuilt primarily serves home builders. It does not sell the frame-building system itself, but rather operates factories equipped with robots to produce frames for home-building customers.
“The timing of structure affects all other sectors involved in the construction process and can make or break a developer's budget,” Ames said. “The vast majority of… structural components are built by people using manual methods… BotBuilt empowers builders by helping them increase their volume as much and margin by leveraging abundant, high-quality and affordable robotic labor.”
Ames acknowledges that BotBuilt has rivals in the home construction robotics space such as Have a date, weinman and House of Design. Others include Diamond Age and Mighty Homes, both of which have created systems that can print and assemble components such as home interiors and roof structures.
BotBuilt is off to a soft start, with only nine homes built so far and revenue hovering around $75,000. But Ames says the pace will increase in 2024; The plan is to start shipping frames built by its robotics while scaling BotBuilt's overall operations, she says.
“Manual wall panel and framing plants operate at 30 to 40% gross margins, so our level of automation will allow us to be significantly higher and still deliver significant cost savings to builders,” Ames says. (He estimates that BotBuilt makes ~$15,000 in revenue for each home built with wall panels.) “We already have ten builders with more than 2,000 houses and apartments under construction, and we will build them as quickly as we can with our initial project. two factories.”
To help scale the company, BotBuilt has raised $12.4 million in a seed funding round led by Shadow Ventures. Part of the tranche, which values BotBuilt at $34 million after the money is paid, will go toward growing the Durham-based company's North Calrionia team from 13 people to about 20, Ames says.
