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Comment by carrozo | Hacker News Reader

It seems likely that, in the coming two decades, the construction industry will need to place a greater focus on updating existing properties, in addition to simply building new homes.

Remodelling existing stock seems like an enormous opportunity for construction tech.

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The elephant in the room here is that the lifespan of a lot of recently built houses is not necessarily what we might expect. A lot of these houses will turn out to have problems that will effectively “total” them as they age. There are a lot of McMansions out there that simply have no real long term future.

Could you expand on some of these points? For example, has there been new construction material of which the long-term effects are unknown, or has there been new architectural design methods?

Or were you saying that as a blanketed statement of opinion

Not the new materials but the new design and construction methods. The decades of shaving margins have had their toll to the point where apartment complexes are not even making it out of the warranty period before developing major structural flaws.

There is also, for example, the fascination with butterfly or hipped roofs (where the main gutters are in the middle of the roof instead of the edges), which will cause problems any time the rainfall exceeds the capacity of the gutters and down pipes. Given we are heading into more extreme weather with shorter, heavier downpours, it seems to me that hip and butterfly roofs are a bad idea.

I have seen a few houses condemned because of water damage due to eg: one builder using a three inch deep gutter instead of the specified six inch gutter. Saving a few dollars at the cost of destroying the value of the property.

Cutting corners and an increasing reliance on industry “self regulation” means that housing built in the last decade here in Australia is only temporary.

Remodeling is already fairly prevalent in the US, especially in popular, expensive places where it's difficult to get new housing approved. Most people I know that bought a house also did a remodel that costed them $100k-$300k before moving in. I'm somewhat surprised more construction companies haven't gotten into it.

There's a company in my area that is focused on this and to your point they are doing great for themselves.

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