Show HN: Acre Designs (YC W16) - Zero-Energy Smarthomes as a Consumer Product
acredesigns.com
acredesigns.com
We are challenging the typical model, which produces uninspired homes that consume far too many resources: time, energy and money. Our idea is to treat the home-buying and home-building process more like a product. We offer NetZero homes that are simple and quick to build, for a fixed, competitive price nationwide.
Our first offering is upmarket a la Tesla, but will offer our own Model 3 (i.e. lower price-point) sometime next year. Vision is to replace standard homes with high quality, beautiful smart homes that are powered by the sun.
We'd love to get your feedback, especially about driving sales online—how can we get better at getting people to place deposits online? and about the longer term vision of housing: zero-energy, but also sharing economy, mobile lifestyles, density. We'd really appreciate hearing the thoughts and suggestions of this community!
p.s. If any of you hackers are interested, we want to experiment with making homes that go all-out on automation and logging. We'll do that at no extra cost for anyone who found out about us through this thread.
EDIT: Also, the line about "the home being a status symbol but you get a smaller home for the feels and the same status symbol effect" struck me as odd and somewhat off-putting.
For us air tightness takes a bit of precedence.
Note taken: Point was to shift status from size to smarter lifestyle. It's always hard to see stuff when you live it.
Thanks
Would be great if you had some blog posts about the decisions behind the engineering.
I'm pretty interested in this stuff and would be curious for example how you arrive at ZE given different consumption patterns with different people. I see a lot of people pointing at solar as their low hanging fruit whereas I'm much more of the mindset that minimizing temperature variance is much more important.
Doing pretty good with my current house already but would love to see more pointers towards a more rigorous approach towards insulation, air tightness etc.
Yes, blogging is due, much to share.
Reducing consumption is first step, not getting caught up by what's cool is a big factor too. Rigor is required
Imo, air tightness trumps r value. Hard to do either consistently with traditional construction. Stay tuned I'll try to more on the blog.
The technical challenges are in retrofit.
You might find Energiesprong (http://energiesprong.nl/transitionzero/) of interest - basically factory manufactured walls with joinery, move to site, crane on.
PH is an extremely worthy initiative, but I can't help think it's ripe for a bit of disruption. The whole certification process adds needless cost to a build/retrofit and doesn't help with the perception of high performance homes being expensive.
There's no real reason PH has to be more expensive than anything else. Just that volume housebuilders won't be able to pay minimum wages to people they find on the street any more...
Good article here- http://www.energyvanguard.com/blog-building-science-HERS-BPI...
PH is performance based, but the religion is a bit excessive on R. I do greatly value the air tightness and the quantitative approach.
High R-Value walls are tough to build and get expensive quick. Double wall, exterior sheathing, more parts, more fasteners, etc. We use SIPS walls/roof that have very good R, very little thermal bridging and outstanding air tightness while being fast to build.
I saw your site yesterday, was put off by the fact you're accepting deposits but most of the floorplans are not even available.
Also, wasn't clear to me that these were "production ready". More than saying it, prove it (pictures, videos, etc). I'm not spending 500K on a beta product, that works for software not so much for homes. Even with Tesla's roadster, I had followed for a couple years before they ever sold one to the public. I didn't realize it at the time, but they did a long-term content marketing strategy. They talked about the technology, design, and a lot of teaser content. All that probably pulled in plenty of deposits but over the course of years as people saw the progress they were making and got excited.
On your site - it felt like all I saw were renderings which make me think this is at an experimental stage. Is this house built to last? Will it work in my climate? Could I just hire an architect and replicate the same thing for half the cost? What's the mortgage process like for this? I felt like I had a lot of questions unanswered. I'm not really in the market but like to follow new home solutions.
I think as you get questions from potential buyers, turn that into content to educate your audience. Talk about the materials, technologies, design considerations. I think you've probably done a lot of work that could get people interested, it's a long-term thing and I would think people have to be 100% confident in this product to put a deposit. Which leads to another thought, is a deposit the best CTA? Maybe have them schedule a sales/info call with someone? Ease them into it. Answer their questions.
Edit: I revisited the site and see that you are leading with a sales call, but on my first visit when I saw "reserve now" and talk of the $10k deposit, I assumed the button was going to ask for my money. Might want to make it more clear that you just want to talk.
Check out the news section for a home we just completed with video of the build process. Maybe we'll push that up front a bit more. It's at a different price point, so have to battle that, but its good example.
We'll also have a model home complete late summer and available for people to AirBnB. It's hard to map out all of the differences online and in text, but the open house we had for the last home left fantastic impressions.
It will still be an early adopter audience, but we can add content to build confidence.
Homes were designed for the Kansas City climate initially, so will handle most weather. Easily adapted for northern and southern extremes. A custom, architect designed home of this nature will cost much more and be a long process, we are trying to amortize those costs over many homes. Maybe a couple of comparisons would help gel the differences?
It's tough trying to qualify buyers in this context with out being too blunt or too wordy. Experiment away!
Thanks for your analysis!
The homebuilding business is about controlling land. The big boys option hundreds or thousands of buildable lots a pop. In a metro area, that's still a drop in the bucket. Controlling that many lots justifies a sales center, in house financing, and creates one stop shopping.
Land converters, those who subdivide land into residential lots, usually prefer to sell to home builders. It lets them deal with professionals and let the homebuilders who buy lots do all the high touch consumer sales or take the risk of building on spec.
The consumer oriented home design business is likewise bimodal. The big spike is price sensitive: it's $500 online blueprints. Everything else is high touch. Money is no object clients are both rare and tend to be high maintenance. They must be cultivated socially...church, civic club, university homecoming, whatever. They have options...those with buildable lots have even more, including just sitting on it.
Regarding taking deposits, there's almost certainly going to be contractor licensing laws in play. In the best case both a state homebuilder license and a local business license. In the worst case, a local homebuilder license and a local business license. Local homebuilders' associations are fairly active. They will report unlicensed competition.
Legally, laws regarding construction are far more entrenched than those surrounding other disrupted industries...they go back to Hamurabi. Unlike a taxi or a rented room, construction is visible and can't be moved. The local fire marshal has seen people die. The local council woman wants to protect property values by preventing shoddy construction. Local home owners, want to keep construction out of their backyard, unlike an Uber they're not likely to become late adopters...it comes back to location.
Technically, the amount of variation nationwide is massive. There is a combinatorial explosion of wind, seismic, snow, ASHRE, moisture, and aesthetic requirements and preferences. That's before touching soils...every site is potentially different. At best there are local and regional requirements regarding radon and frost depth. At worst, there's rock to muck on adjacent lots.
Anyway, it's an interesting problem.
Good luck.
We work with local builders, providing the fully designed/engineered packages, with ALL materials needed to build that specific high performance home.
You are right, trying to do this in a fully centralized and detached from community is not workable. We think our take leverages the strengths of both parties and allows us to do this much more broadly.
Regarding technical challenges, we engineer our SIPS shells for seismic by default and can accommodate most snow loads (Tahoe project in the works). HOA's are a PITA no doubt, but urban infill is possible and green field is always going on regardless.
From floor down is all local and must be adapted, so not so turn key there But hey, can't have everything.
Gotta run, but like your approach. Maybe more later.
I'd be up for trying this if I could get it for around 250-300k for the 4br and then that allows me to pick up the land for 150k and come out about 150k cheaper than a standard house, but you're expecting me to pony up 500k + whatever it costs for the land plot, when I can just buy a house for 550k in the same neighborhood prebuilt.
My point is, your value prop isn't real. It's a great home, and a great idea, but it's actually more expensive square foot for square foot.
My wife and I are going to be house hunting in the next two years, and we would have considered this option but it's actually more expensive.
You can give the standard Tesla "but you'll have lower (gas/electric) bills" argument but I like air conditioning, so I doubt that's true for me, and even if it was, it doesn't really sell me either. "Because you'll save so much in the long run(and we can't really prove you will), you need to pay an extra 150k up front!" doesn't ring well.
EDIT: To clarify, I basically feel like in order for this business to work at all, it has to be a much cheaper option than a normal home, because there is an accompanying huge risk in investing in one of these. It's resale value may be next to zero, and all it's fancy gadgets will be out of date by the end of next year.
This first series is the first DVD player. High end, priced at a premium and for early adopters. It'll help us push the edge of our product and fund development of tech/engineering that pushes future price down.
We should be able to launch homes in the $225K range next year that can be built spec and start helping that average family. That is no easy task and nothing else is commonly available anywhere. The early adopters will pave the way for everyone else, just like the Roadster and Model S is doing for the Model 3 and spurring on the rest of the industry to pay attention.
Currently Net-Zero homes start around $250/sqft, with many that push well above that. We aren't really targeting the mid west, where this does tip the scales (we are originally from Kansas City, so appropriate the gap). In major metros in CA, OR, CO, WA, etc, this is actually a good deal for a normal home and a steal for a turn key zero energy home. Our current home in Redwood City, CA is zillowed at $1.6M and would be $220K in KC. It's all relative.
I'll disagree on the resale. The principal of the home is based on passive heating/cooling, good design and great materials, so performs well regardless. Solar will last 30, quality is significantly better than par and even the software can be updated.
Keep posted, we will have a model home available via AirBnB late summer and you can see how truly different (better) these homes are. By the time you are ready to buy, we should also have our next series available.
Just like there were a few electric cars before Tesla, but none ready for prime time. It's going to take a lot of hard work to change a very outdated market.
Regardless of which area you're building in, the bottom line seems to be that I'd pay $400k this year for something I could get for $225k next year. Whether I'm in KC and it's worth $220k or Bay Area and it's worth $1.6mil I'm still immediately losing $200k at the time of purchase for no benefit other than having the property a year earlier.
Next year we will offer the Tesla Model 3 version in addition to our premium version. Average price, above average performance, cool tech and blows away Acura's, Fords and Chevy's, but lacking the flash and bells and whistles of the higher end.
Bingo. I've never lived in one house for more than 7 or 8 years so planning to own a house for longer than 8 years is foolish.
If I had to choose between this house and the $20,000 house that was featured on HN a while back, I'd take the 20k house and save 380k for retirement.
Love the homes, have followed their work for some time and would certainly consider for $20K.
You'll notice it was actually $135K to build, not their 20K "aspiration". That would take them to $128/sq ft which is close to our last home which you can find in our news section. We'll be able to offer that at scale, at a net zero performance level next year.
Beyond that, to remake our housing industry, it'll take many different builders and architects offering different products at different sizes and price points. Definitely not a one size fits all market.
You can get 80% of the way there by blowing foam into the walls, sealing leaks, investing in good windows, and making sure your HVAC system is appropriately sized and used only when needed.
Disclaimer: I used to work on this: http://ecomod.unm.edu/ so I might be somewhat cynical.
CA has Title 24, which mandates net zero for new homes, so that is the long term focus.
Check out the home we just completed for $145K, looks great, great performance and very comfortable. It's just hard to do at scale with out a bit of a war chest.
As you know, blowing foam, sealing leaks, upgrading HVAC, and good windows will run most folks close to $60-$100k to upgrade. That will still leave it fairly leaky, have an un-insulated foundation and be an older structure. Wish there was an easier solution to upgrading existing homes, but that is a tough business.
I don't believe in local stick build kits for your business. Every customer is going to consider the total cost of labor for your houses. I don't know if it's possible, but I hope you consider partnering with a modular home builder with an existing sales network. Clayton Homes or whatever. Then you only need to build to one standard (Fed DOT... I could be wrong though, never looked into the regulations too deeply) and you can leverage their sales and financing force.
https://www.fortis.edu/blog/skilled-trades/wasted-attic-heat...
I wonder about the option of scavenging heat in the attic during the winter into the rest of the house (through filters) or if it's just a waste of effort.
PCM's (phase change materials) might work better in this application. However, air tightness and a consistent insulation layer is best.
The challenge I've had is keeping the house warm in the winter where internal temps will drop down to the 50s without the heater on. During the summer, I rarely have to turn on the AC even when it's a 100+ day so there's plenty of insulation. I suspect much of the heat loss is due to the giant windows that I have even though they are double pane.
We have a Crestron Pyng as the central hub with attached goodies.
We also have our own Raspberry Pi based data logger that captures up to 40+ channels of temperature, humidity, luminance, occupancy, and thinking about a thermal imaging camera. Also can capture circuit based power usage and PV production to get a better sense of consumption/production cycles.
Keyless locks Dropcam Operable shading Lutron Pico wireless light switching with scenes Leak Detection Remote management/security (AirBnB) features. Whole home media etc.
We are looking at appliance connectivity, but want real function not just gadgetry. It's an quickly changing landscape, so the list will grow and morph, but pushing for real utility and performance enhancing tech.
Bringing this all under one central control hub would probably take an equal stakeholder in your business. It's just as important as the material aspect of the home. If you don't have the wherewithal for this, you should probably avoid doing ANY kind of fancy electronic stuff. I know the PV panels are a non-negotiable... but I would suggest not going beyond that until you can create an SDK. This manages expectations, and paves a sane "upgrade" path for the hardware. Simple is always better than fancy.