At $447,054, median home prices reached another record in June. Americans are priced out. But could technology save the day?

This afternoon, I’m meeting with a startup that promises to make building a house way faster and cheaper. But before I do, I wanted to research the current state of the art in technology for construction.

Here’s what I found…

Mobile Factories

One really cool approach to construction is to make houses in a factory. And best of all, the factory comes to you!

Cuby is one of the most exciting startups taking this approach. They pop up a factory on the construction site.

The mobile factory makes houses faster, easier and cheaper to produce. While traditional construction requires skilled labor, the Cuby factories do just fine with unskilled workers that are easier to find and cheaper to employ.

3D Printed Housing

What if instead of building houses, we printed them?

Sounds crazy, right? But several startups are doing this today.

The giant 3D printers extrude a material like concrete or plastic. Startups like ICON can even build multistory structures using these giant printers.

Cement is great because it’s solid, unlike a lot of the ticky-tacky wooden construction I see today.

Construction Robots

Robots are everywhere these days. I even saw one at Shoprite on Tuesday, in the aisles taking inventory!

Startups like Monumental, which I wrote about on the blog last year, are bringing robots to the construction site. Monumental’s bots can lay brick autonomously.

What’s great about this approach is it doesn’t rely on new construction techniques. You can use the methods that are tried and true.

You just have a robot doing it instead of a human.

Wrap-Up

Of all these exciting approaches, which one has the best shot at making housing affordable again?

My pick is construction robots. You don’t need novel building techniques or new materials to make this work. You just need to get a robot to do what a human is already doing.

However, I’m always open to founders showing me the future. Maybe someone has a better approach I haven’t seen yet. If so, I’d love to check it out!

Here’s the future I dream of: anyone can afford a nice, spacious house in the location of their choice. Housing goes from being a focus of anxiety to a normal purchase, like buying a couch.

The government won’t get us there. Technology will.

More on tech:

Your Next House Will Be Built By Robots

Are Hackers After Your Brain? — The Rise of CogSec

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