Episode 6: The Tesla of Homebuilding - a podcast by Andrew Weinreich, serial entrepreneur & inventor of the worlds first social network, sixdegrees

Have we hit a tipping point for residential construction where the cost and quality of a factory-built home always compares favorably to the cost and quality of a conventionally-built home? Are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists beginning to train their sights on this mammoth industry? In the sixth and final episode of a series on the future of homebuilding, Andrew discusses how entrepreneurs eager to disrupt this space might conceive of building and financing a modern homebuilding factory.








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IntervieweesEpisode Excerpt

SCG Heim – The Factory of the FutureIf you’re interested in what the process looks like to build a house in a factory, you can get a pretty good idea just by searching on YouTube for the company that owns the factory. Most companies engaged in this type of manufacturing are proud to display their factories’ capabilities in videos. Amazingly, most of the factories in the United States are not what you would typically associate with the image of a modern factory. Inside of a huge hangar, you can see lots of people manually moving house components from one location to another with relatively few machines in sight. There’s an assembly line, for sure, but it looks more like what you’d expect to see in a factory from 100 years ago than something you’d associate with a modern factory operated primarily by robots.


If you look outside of the United States, you can find much more advanced homebuilding factories that are more evocative of the robotics-driven future that automotive factories like Tesla and Toyota have already made into a reality. The factory that most impressed me was the SCG Heim factory in the province of Saraburi in Central Thailand, northeast of Bangkok.SCG Heim is a joint venture between The Siam Cement Public Company and Sekisui Chemical Group. SCG is the fourth largest company in Thailand, making chemicals, paper, cement, and building materials. Sekisui is a Japanese chemical company that also has a housing division. While I couldn’t get anyone from SCG Heim to speak with me for this podcast, the robotics visible in their video reflected as impressive a manufacturing process as any I had seen. They use light gauge steel for framing homes with fully-automated robotics supplied by Kawasaki. I read online that the factory has the ability to produce 1,000 homes per year.


In a factory run by SCG Heim, or even Tesla, you see giant machines with arms moving parts that are welded together by other giant machines with arms. So it’s easy to imagine if someone were going to literally copy this kind of automated factory for producing housing modules, the materials they would be using to frame the homes would be steel or aluminum.Except, here in the United States, we have a long history of building our homes from wood. And with good reason. Unlike many other parts of the world, North America has a relative abundance of forests that can be harvested for wood. You can also generally expect the cost of labor to be cheaper if you’re framing a home with wood, as compared to bricks, for example, which is much more labor-intensive. So what would a factory with robots look like that makes housing modules out of wood?Weinmann


Weinmann, located in St. Johann, Germany, sells more machinery worldwide for this type of homebuilding factory than anyone else. There are currently 5,000 Weinmann machines operating in 150 homebuilding factories worldwide. Weinmann won’t just sell me the machines for my factory. They’ll design the entire factory for me. Hansbert Ott is Managing Director for Weinmann and has worked at the company f...

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