The world needs two billion new homes in the next 80 years, the World Economic Forum said in 2018. The United States needs 3.8 million additional new homes just to meet existing consumer demand, Realtor.com estimated in 2020. And yet, with perhaps 600,000 homeless people in the US and 40 million people living in poverty in the richest country on Earth, it’s not just about quantity.
It’s also about price.
And, price to the planet. Construction is already the source of 40% of our carbon footprint globally. How do we house people effectively, efficiently, cost-effectively, and in a planet-friendly way?
According to innovative housing startup Mighty Buildings CTO Dmitry Starodubtsev, the answer is to reinvent construction with a mix of pre-fabrication, 3D printing, automation, plus a heft dose of ZNE, or Zero Net Energy: homes that generate all the power they need to consume.
A conceptual example of a Mighty Buildings construction site.
“We’re trying to automate the construction process, increase quality, and increase factory throughput in order basically to unlock productivity in the regions with high housing demand,” Starodubtsev told me on a recent TechFirst podcast. “The entire system works to eliminate as many labor hours on site as possible in order to reduce pricing and make it more affordable for different generations of people, not only millennials.”
Essentially: 3D print custom components, mass-produce standard building blocks, design holistically, and automate as much as possible. All 3D printing can actually be slower for large components, while all pre-fab limits creativity and customization.
If it works, goodbye six month construction timelines for a single home. Think life-size Lego for homebuilding.
“We produce highly completed … sets of components which already implement … exterior finishes, interior finishes, as well as connectors to assemble the entire system faster,” he says. “We put it on site as Lego blocks … and then we can easily assemble those pieces within like hours instead of months of typical construction time.”
The promise is 2X faster construction time while generating 99% less waste. Cost reductions are not quite as impressive, however.
Currently, Starodubtsev says Mighty Buildings homes, which he defines as “semi-premium,” are about 20% less expensive than comparable traditionally-built homes. Prefab Review estimates single-family house costs at $435,900 to $512,400 for a 1,440 square foot home in California, which isn’t exactly going to solve the affordability crisis.
However, as the company scales — Mighty Buildings recently pivoted from consumer sales to large-scale B2B sales — Starodubtsev says costs will come down significantly.
“The larger adoption of technology is possible only when we are working with the developers as B2B customers,” he says. “Scaling the processes is one of the goals of the company … in order to achieve a certain point when technology will get this necessary adoption to become really affordable for the entire market.”
The B2C market in which anyone can go to the company’s website, order up a home, design it, pay for it, and set up shipping to their building lot is still coming, he says. But for now the company is focused on community-scale projects.
Those community-scale projects include ZNE homes: pre-fab homes with solar panels that can share energy around the community as needed. The company is currently working with a developer to build exactly that kind of community right now in Southern California: a 20-home hilltop development with 1,200 square-foot homes. Might Buildings is also working on projects in the Middle East and in a cold-weather region of South Korea.
Ironically, emerging from COVID has actually slowed the company down somewhat as digitized processes revert to physical:
“When COVID came, so we changed the way how we do onsite inspections with the authorities and by leveraging new digital tools, just simply providing videos etc., and it was enough,” Starodubtsev says. “But once COVID like stopped, they switched back to their previous model.”
The company will have some competition. According to Crunchbase, there are currently 984 construction startups that have raised a collective $10.5 billion to reinvent how we build homes and other structures.
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