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Why doesn’t house construction ever get disrupted?

2 points by brokencode ↗ HN
House construction today is still extremely expensive and labor intensive, even in an age of mass production and automation. Houses are mostly built by hand with saws and nail guns on the job site.

There are some companies that make modular houses in factories, but it really isn’t any cheaper to build a house that way compared to the normal methods.

Why is this? Is it just too expensive and cumbersome to ship large parts of a house to the job site? And are any there any disruptive construction techniques available today or in the near future that could change this?

7 comments

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ggm
Huge amounts of compliance in domestic house building. Watched an engineer do drawings for our extension 25 years ago, modding one dimension made him recalculate wind shear loading and include a sheet of ply to make a cell rigid. That kind of thing means "disruption" has costs you don't see.
brokencode
That’s a custom house extension, but I’m talking about new construction. Most home builders just build small variations of the same few designs in mass quantities.

Once the design is complete, why can’t we mass produce the same house reliably and with minimal labor?

ggm
Kit homes, prefab, premade steel, off the plan all exist. Minimal labour may be close to where we are. Varies by economy how much this is done. Down here in Oz tamawood are selling identical homes from a small set of plans, in germany prefab is huge, it's on "grand designs" a lot: complete wall sections with plumbing and wiring and windows and insulation predicted, slot together.
wizofaus
3d printing technology for buildings already exists and works, good chance of that becoming very disruptive (it's only become commercially viable in the last couple of years AIUI).
MattGaiser
I have relatives in the homebuilding business. One of the biggest challenges I am told is compliance. You would need to try and design a house that fit each different building code.
wizofaus
That would definitely be a problem if the compliance regulations were written based on existing technologies with insufficient flexibility to allow for buildings that are functionally and safety-wise equivalent but using technologies that didn't exist or weren't considered when the regulations were written. It's definitely the sort of thing that can slow down innovation, but it's not going to prevent it altogether. Regulation should never prevent developing proof-of-concept buildings and then being able demonstrate that they're just as good as those built with conventional technology, and building codes aren't carved in stone (even if they change at a seemingly glacial pace).