Amazon, Obvious invest in Yves Behar-designed prefab home startup | Hacker News Reader

Amazon, Obvious invest in Yves Behar-designed prefab home startup

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31 pointssmalera16 comments

Some of the designs look amazing, but this is a killer:

“ The first of Behar’s line is the YB1; it retails for $300,000 (plus another $100,000 for things like delivery and installation) and is a 625-square-feet, one-bed, one-bath that looks like a glass cube with a slatted wooden exterior.”

Well over $600/sqft for construction costs? That’s extremely rarified air, especially for an ADU.

I imagine with scale it will come down.

If you can't build a tiny house in trailer for reasonable money nobody should invest in your prefab business.

There are ready to move (RTM) structures all over. Not sure why this is so much money.

That doesn't make any sense. Lots of custom designed houses are built in single unit quantities with a bigger living area at a lower cost. There is no scale to benefit from and yet they destroy these homes in terms of cost efficiency.

The proof of this pudding will be in the living.

Seems like the structure does well in mild climates like that Santa Monica. How would it do in rainy places like Seattle, or Cold continental places like Minneapolis?

Perhaps it'll do well. People will need to know it does well and appreciates as much as co-located traditional homes.

It does have nice aesthetic design cues, but except for people who can afford to tear down and rebuild when bored, homes have to last. I guess we'll find out.

$300,000 for only the house? What about the three most important aspects of real estate? Which are also mostly determining the value: location, location, location

I would imagine the point of a prefab house is that you get high quality design for cheap because of economies of scale. Is that not what's happening here? Is there another reason why this is a compelling product for consumers?

The designs are fine, but if I were going to spend that much, I would feel weird not having input into the design and limiting myself, regardless of how celebrated the designer is.

Can some share some insight on why the construction industry hasn't moved to prefab for cookie cutter single family homes ? Does it not reduce labor costs in comparison to the current method of home building ?

I think the efficiency cost reduction isn't as great as you might imagine. If you look at the National Association of Home Builder's estimates for building a home in the USA [1], construction cost is about half of the total, and you still have to prepare the site, build the foundation and finish the site (at least 20% of construction costs). So your share of offsite construction cost would be at most 40% of total costs. Though factory construction work tends to pay a little less than field work it's not that much less -- maybe 20%. So in the end you don't save much and still have to deal with the logistics of delivery.

That said there are other production efficiencies which would make it worthwhile IMO. But cost is king.

[1] http://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?genericContentID=260...

People love their square footage and you can't get that with a prefab 1 story.

That and most prefab/manufactured homes look cheap.

I actually love the design...

I'll pass on Alexa, though. I'll take a dumb home, please. I don't mind flicking a switch. Or I'd rather build much if that side out myself...

The only thing I like about Alexa is when the servers go down and they're no logner supported in 10 years, people will be stuck holding-the-bag like Betamax and Laser Disc holdouts.

There's still a community of LaserDisc fans.

According to a colleague, some anime were only released in high quality on LaserDisc.

I don't really believe that, I see their hobby as being like collecting vinyl music, but for video.

And what's the problem?

Noone uses rotary phones today, but that is ok.

You can replace a rotary phone. Alexa is built right into the house itself.

I’d prefer one of these:

https://www.mimahousing.com/mima-essential

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