A new podcast series about revolutions in technology has kicked off its inaugural episodes with a detailed look at building science and the future of home building.
Hosted by entrepreneur Andrew Weinreich, Predicting Our Future explores how people all over the world can save dramatically on the cost of building a new home, how factory-built construction can address explosive global population growth, lessons that home builders can learn from automotive companies, and the journey from designing to financing a modern home building factory.
Each episode, dowloadable from iTunes, examines a different area of residential construction. The topics include:
Episode 1: Home In a Box. Between 1908 and 1942, Sears sold 100,000 homes that were delivered in kits consisting of 12,000 pieces. While Sears is no longer in the business of making prefabricated homes, a new class of technology-driven startups has picked up the mantle and is now delivering kits, which once they’re put together, make modern homes.
Episode 2: Half-Priced Hamptons. Modular builders have taken the art of prefabrication to an entirely new level, where entire rooms with insulation, plumbing, and electric wiring are made in a factory. These rooms (called “modules”) are transported to a building site and then stacked next to and on top of one another to form a home in days. In the Hamptons, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other major cities, it’s now possible to build a beautiful modern home modularly for as much as 50% the cost of building with local contractors.
Episode 3: Google, China, and Overnight Cities. If a trillion dollar market opportunity exists, you can bet Google is thinking about it. Within Google’s most secretive lab, they’ve thought about how to make building construction more efficient to deal with the world’s severe and worsening urban housing shortage. In China, one company has figured out how to deal with this challenge by building skyscrapers inside of factories.
Episode 4: NYC Goes Modular. In the summer of 2016, the world’s tallest modular building at 32 stories high was completed in New York City. Once the modules were completed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they were transported to a development site next to the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn and assembled into a high-rise by stacking one module on top of another. The project was years late, riddled with construction problems, and the subject of a costly litigation. But with these problems now behind them, can this modular project, as well as others in Brooklyn, herald in a new era of building construction in New York City?
Episode 5: Cars, Mars, and 3D Printing. In 2012, six single family homes were made from a 3D printer in China. The inventor of that 3D printing technology is now working on a 3D printer for making buildings on Mars. Is this technology the future for all building construction, or does the future involve modern factories leveraging machinery and robotics similar to what you can find today in a modern automotive plant?
Episode 6: The Tesla of Homebuilding. Have we finally hit a tipping point where the cost and quality of a factory-built home is so much better than what you can get from local contractors that the majority of new construction can occur in a factory? Has the Tesla of new home construction already been launched and we’re yet to hear about it? Or is the space ripe for a new entrepreneur to take the world by storm? How should an entrepreneur think about building and financing a new modern homebuilding factory?
