Brave new houses

I have said for sometime that someone will figure out how to 3-D print houses and thus disintermediate the building industry. The problem with the current system is two-fold:

1. It takes months to get a house built (here in Australia), and
2. The materials now only represent around 20% of the finished costs (when you extract all the supply chain margins away) and the rest is layers and layers of expensive service providers. And a few non service providers.

Enter the Chinese, of all people with their low labour costs. A company with the catchy and very differentiated name of WinSun has developed a concrete 3-D printer for houses that can print 10 houses in a day. The printing looks like it’s still happening in a factory but lets hope they shrink it and make it portable enough to be taken on site.

The results look like rubbish now but come back in a few years and we won’t want our houses built any other way. Today it’s good enough for garages, dog houses, asylum seeker detention centres and the visually impaired.