Homes aren’t getting cheaper – or necessarily easier to insure.
This year, the median household income for homebuyers jumped to $107,000 from $88,000 last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. The volume of homes for sale in the US reached a registers lowmeanwhile — and shows no signs of recovery.
Now, one could argue that the rising price and associated decrease in housing supply are positive trends, in fact, because they could push families toward more environmentally friendly, sustainable alternatives. Studies projection that single-family suburbs contribute to significant greenhouse gas emissions while discouraging affordable new housing.
But startups like BotBuilt argue that prospective homebuyers can have their cake and eat it, too, by embracing technology to lower the cost—and mitigate the negative impacts—of home building.
BotBuilt is the brainchild of Brent Wadas, Colin Devine and robotics engineer Barrett Ames. Founded in 2020, the company aims to create a robotic system that can take a building plan, translate that plan into a series of machine commands, and send those commands to the aforementioned system.
What inspired the co-founders to get into home building? Personal experience, according to Ames. While a graduate student at Duke, Ames and his wife bought a property near the college campus and enlisted friends and family to help renovate the house. During the remodeling, Ames says he learned a lot about the challenges — and patterns — of construction.
“The housing industry is facing a huge housing shortage, and builders know they need to keep building as many homes as possible to cover years of infrastructure,” Ames told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Due to rising interest rates, many people do not want to let go of their current homes and the associated interest rates, further increasing the demand for new homes.”
Now, BotBuilt’s envisioned system doesn’t build houses from scratch. Instead, it focuses on a specific part of the building “flow”: building frames.
BotBuilt’s robotics assembles wall panels, floor beams, and ceiling beams, several of the primary framing components of homes. The company’s system, which apparently costs about $1 an hour to operate, can be reprogrammed to create “completely” different house frame designs relatively quickly, Ames says.
Image Credits: BotBuilt
“The flexibility of our robotic systems is our … big advantage,” Ames said. “Previous attempts to use robots for manufacturing innovation have relied heavily on hard automation, meaning robots are programmed to do the same task over and over again. This approach works well for repetitive tasks like car manufacturing, but it doesn’t suit the manufacturing industry, where there is a huge variety of designs.”
By automating the framing step, it is Ames’ theory that the pace of home construction can be dramatically accelerated while reducing costs.
Usually, house framing Court fees $7 to $16 per square foot, which includes $4 to $10 in framing labor costs. Framing takes about a month, best case scenario, but factors like bad weather can delay things – as can labor shortages. According in the National Association of Home Builders, more than 55% of single-family home builders reported a shortage of skilled labor in all home construction trades, including framing, in 2021.
BotBuilt primarily provides services to home builders. It does not sell the frame building system itself, but operates factories equipped with robots to produce frames for customers who build homes.
“The timing of configuration affects every other trade involved in the construction process and can make or break a developer’s budget,” Ames said. “The vast majority of … framing components are made by humans using manual methods… BotBuilt empowers manufacturers by helping them scale and margin by leveraging an abundant, high-quality and affordable robotic workforce.”
Ames acknowledges that BotBuilt has competitors in the home robotics space, including Radek, Weinmann and House of Design. Others include Diamond Age and Mighty Homes, which have created systems that can print and assemble components such as home interiors and roof structures.
BotBuilt is off to a soft start, with only nine homes built so far and revenue hovering around $75,000. But Ames claims the pace will pick up in 2024. The plan is to start shipping trusses made by its robotics while scaling BotBuilt’s general operations, he says.
“Manual wall panel and truss plants operate at 30-40% gross margins, so our level of automation will allow us to be significantly higher than that and still deliver significant cost savings to manufacturers,” says Ames. (He estimates that BotBuilt makes ~$15,000 in revenue per wall panel home built.) “We already have ten builders with over 2,000 homes and condo units in our pipeline to build, and we’ll build them as quickly as we can with our initial two factories”.
To help grow the company, BotBuilt raised $12.4 million in a seed funding round. Previous investors include Ambassador Supply, Y Combinator, Owens Corning and Shadow Ventures. Part of the tranche, which values BotBuilt at $35 million post-money, will go toward growing the Durham, North Carolina-based company’s team from 13 people to about 20, Ames says.
