\n<\/p>\n
Homes aren\u2019t getting cheaper \u2014 or necessarily easier to secure.<\/p>\n
This year, the median household income for home buyers jumped to $107,000 from $88,000 last year, according<\/a> to the National Association of Realtors. The volume of homes for sale in the U.S. reached a record a low<\/a>, meanwhile \u2014 and shows no sign of recovery.<\/p>\n Now, one might argue the increasing price and interrelated decreasing supply of homes are positive trends, in fact, because they could push families toward more environmentally friendly, sustainable alternatives. Studies show<\/a> that single-family suburbs contribute significant greenhouse gas emissions while discouraging<\/a> affordable new housing.<\/p>\n But startups such as BotBuilt<\/a> make the case that prospective homebuyers can have their cake and eat it, too, by embracing tech to lower the cost \u2014 and mitigate the negative impacts \u2014 of homebuilding.<\/p>\n 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 in a building plan, translate that plan into a series of machine commands and send those commands to the aforementioned system.<\/p>\n What inspired the co-founders to tackle homebuilding? Personal experience, according to Ames. While a graduate student at Duke, Ames and his wife bought a fixer-upper near the college campus and recruited friends and family to help renovate the house. Throughout the remodel, Ames says he learned a lot about the challenges \u2014 and patterns \u2014 of construction.<\/p>\n \u201cThe housing industry is facing a huge housing shortage, and builders know they have to continue to build as many homes as possible to make up for years of underbuilding,\u201d Ames told TechCrunch in an email interview. \u201cBecause of the increase in interest rates, many people do not want to leave their current homes and associated rates, further increasing the demand for new housing.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, BotBuilt\u2019s envisioned system doesn\u2019t erect homes from scratch. It focuses instead on a specific part of the homebuilding \u201cflow\u201d: constructing framing.<\/p>\n BotBuilt\u2019s robotics piece together panels for walls, floor trusses and roof trusses, several of the major framing components of homes. The company\u2019s system, which ostensibly costs around $1 per hour to run, can be reprogrammed to build \u201centirely\u201d different frame designs for homes relatively quickly, Ames says.<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong> BotBuilt<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe flexibility of our robotic systems is our \u2026 big advantage,\u201d Ames said. \u201cPrior attempts to use robots to innovate within construction have largely relied on hard automation, which means that robots are programmed to do the same task over and over again. This approach works well for repetitive tasks like building cars, but it\u2019s a poor fit for the construction industry, where there\u2019s a huge variety of designs.\u201d<\/p>\n By automating the framing step, it\u2019s Ames\u2019 theory that the pace of homebuilding can be dramatically accelerated while reducing costs.<\/p>\n Typically, house framing costs<\/a> $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 \u2014 as can labor shortages. According<\/a> to the National Association of Home Builders, more than 55% of single-family homebuilders reported a shortage of skilled labor across homebuilding trades, including framers, in 2021.<\/p>\n BotBuilt primarily provides services to homebuilders. It doesn\u2019t sell the frame-building system itself, but rather operates robot-equipped factories to produce framing for homebuilding customers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe timing of framing impacts every other trade involved in the construction process and can make or break a developer\u2019s budget,\u201d Ames said. \u201cThe vast majority of \u2026 framing components are built by people using manual methods \u2026 BotBuilt empowers builders by helping them increase both their volume <\/span>and<\/span> margin by leveraging plentiful, high-quality and affordable robotic labor.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Ames acknowledges that BotBuilt has rivals in the robotics homebuilding space, like Randek<\/span>, <\/span>Weinmann<\/span> and House of Design. Others include Diamond Age<\/a> and Mighty Homes<\/a>, both of which have created systems that can print and assemble components like home interiors and roof structures.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n BotBuilt is off to a gentle start, with only nine homes built so far and revenue hovering around $75,000. But Ames claims the pace will ramp up in 2024; the plan is to begin shipping trusses built by its robotics while scaling BotBuilt\u2019s general operations, he says.<\/p>\n \u201cManual 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 builders,\u201d Ames says. (He estimates that BotBuilt makes ~$15,000 in revenue per house of wall panels built.) \u201cWe already have ten builders with over 2,000 homes and apartment units in our pipeline to build, and we will build them as quickly as we can with our initial two factories.\u201d<\/p>\n To help scale the company, BotBuilt has 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 be put toward growing the Durham, North Carolina-based company\u2019s team from 13 people to about 20, Ames says.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n