"...range in price from around $450,000 to close to $600,000."
In other words, there is little economic incentive to recommend this construction method. Not much in the way of aesthetics either --- unless you want a ranch box.
In other words, there is little economic incentive to recommend this construction method. Not much in the way of aesthetics either --- unless you want a ranch box.
Superstructure is about the easiest and fastest part of residential construction. Sitework, finishes, and MEP systems are harder, tend to take longer, and cost more.
Anyway, market rate housing sells at market rates no matter how it is built.
I'm perpetually confused on that front - interior, especially drywall, is stupid labor and time intensive (have to wait for taped joints to dry). There should be huge econmomies of scale for prefab walls with electric and ducting built in, yet all we see is this sort of 3d printing stuff.
Where do you store hundreds of running feet of prefabricated wall during construction delays?
How do you move sections of prefabricated wall into and within a dryed-in building?
How do you trim a section to fit and extend another when construction is not ideal?
Who is responsible when something is not right?
And of course there’s getting UL listings for any proprietary electrical connections and issues of inspection for code compliance.
Prefabricated walls are common and are suitable for cubical farms. They tend to cost more psf than regular construction but can be depreciated as furniture and reconfigured more easily than site built walls and fixtures.
Yet, it’s ironic that we still end up with cookie cutter houses, but they are all built as if they are bespoke.
(But also, this feels like a Mythbusters episode challenge, and they managed to get a lead balloon flying).
There’s also the capital cost of the printer, the inherent complexity of pumping concrete, and the material cost of concreter per unit volume.
My opinion is based on my bullshit detector. I worked in a precast plant with its own concrete plant, for a very large home builder, and for and with residential developers as an architect. Sure I might be wrong, but my opinion is formed from directly related experience with the materials and with the industries.
But even on the face the article is talking about moonbases as future projects not suburban Atlanta.
[1] Most likely this project is subsidized with non-commercial resources.
It is all commoditized and builders and trades people have choices about who they work with and long standing business relationships.
The inherent complexity of construction is a job shop scheduling problem which is not just in NP it is NP hard.
With a whole additional dimension of human social relationships and woven in. Everyone is trying to solve their own NP hard problem across a different set of projects and under a different set of constraints.
Right now most new houses have the wood framing CNC manufactured based on plans, shipped to the building site and assembled, then modified as needed by the builder.
Our roofs are almost exclusively steel, which are also CNC cut and shipped to the site and installed by roofers.
I think of it like the satellite industry. Crazy high launch costs and weight penalties make satellites expensive to build. Maybe there’s some rule that the cost of the satellite has to equal to the launch cost?
I think the same things happens to building prices when the land cost and available land is super limited. Construction kind of rises to take a piece of that?
I’m not sure if I’m explaining the idea well.
That said, searching for prefab walls brings up a lot of things, from whole wall panels, to just prefabed wall framing, and of course, prefabed whole houses. So, it's out there, it's probably a matter of what a builder is familiar with and what's cost efficient for a particular job.
This is a demonstration project.
If there were any economic advantage, I would expect them to be eager to demonstrate it.
But such does not appear to be the case. $450-600K for a simple, single story ranch 30 miles outside of Austin is not exactly awe inspiring.
So not only are you framing differently but you can skip the drywall and insulation steps of construction as well. This is the type of finish work you are talking about I think.
And you still have to insulate. Four feet of concrete wall thickness is needed for a nominal R10.
This is true. Do you see any opportunity for efficiencies in rebuilds?
When this technology has become much more established, the "risk premium" can be decreased by a lot. Then one can start to find methods to make the process more economic. And I see quite some potential there, because 3D printing can potentially be done in a much more "automatic" way than other existing house building processes.
But suppose we have a country of aging housing. Could prefabrication techniques result in lower costs when replacing existing buildings without a land transfer?
2. Single family home construction in the US is highly prefabricated. You can go into any Home Depot and get lumber, fasteners, fixtures, appliances, and anything else you need to build a house. All of it movable and installable without much mechanization beyond a truck (and Home Depot will rent you one of those).
3. Tearing down existing houses for replacement only makes economic sense in two cases. The first is when the value of the land justifies more expensive construction (e.g. MacMansions). The second is when redevelopment is not for the market (e.g. Habitat for Humanity).
4. It is a mistake to look at construction as inefficient. Construction is just one component of real-estate markets.
5. We have very efficient prefabricated housing. It tends to look like mobile homes.
6. Wealth preservation is the primary function of the real-estate industry. Buying and selling for profit is the low end. The real money in real-estate resides in income producing property not single family houses.
Interesting you chose “MacMansions” as the example instead of increased density. In my (very) urban area they tear down single family homes and replace them with 6-9 town homes.
Building a six pack is driven by the same basic economic condition, the existing building is economically obsolescent.
https://www.lennar.com/new-homes/texas/austin-central-texas/...
Just as a random example, this is a comparable house (bigger in fact) and selling for $365k.
https://www.redfin.com/TX/Georgetown/346-White-River-Dr-7862...
I think this is a really cool technology but it’s not competitive yet.
Another way to pad your profit margins would be to raise the asking price of the $360k home by $100k. There is a reason people aren’t doing that.
Amazon deals in commodity goods that are easily substituteable.
Housing is different because every single one is unique (by virtue of location) and also incredibly scarce (again, location).
Housing markets tend to strongly fight any tendency towards underpricing. When a house is underpriced, buyers will get into a bidding war and push the price back into the fair market price.
Look at the results in Florida where the only houses left standing after hurricanes are the ones which are built with ICF (insulated concrete forms)
So for the same money I would argue you are getting a better product. That’s also saying nothing about a more consistent build quality. Timber framed houses vary a lot in quality depending on the crew who built them and the quality of the materials used. Framing with a robot means that there is far less variation in quality, vs framing with crews of humans who are often paid a little as possible and told to work as quickly as possible.
With concrete, you have to wait for it to set before you can print on top of it. D