Homes aren’t getting cheaper—or necessarily easier to secure.
This year, the median household income for home buyers jumped to $107,000 from $88,000 last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. The volume of homes for sale in the U.S. reached a record low, meanwhile—and shows no sign of recovery.
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 that single-family suburbs contribute significant greenhouse gas emissions while discouraging affordable new housing.
But startups such as BotBuilt make the case that prospective homebuyers can have their cake and eat it, too, by embracing tech to lower the cost—and mitigate the negative impacts—of homebuilding.
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.
What inspired the co-founders to tackle homebuilding?