America’s housing market is a factor everyone likes to talk about, mention in the news and align with general economic recovery process. With multiple “bubble events” in the last decade, people still consider it a pretty potent investment opportunity.
But for a foreigner, regular american housing feels cheap and makes it hard to justify the price tag of on average a quarter million dollars for structure built mostly out of wood-post-products. It is because housing, just like everything in the United States, is a advertised to general public as an asset.
Construction companies, as a result, are using this opportunity to make profits employing fastest ways of building and selling those “cookie-cutter” houses. If you think about this more, it becomes obvious that most of such structures will only last 20-30 years, due to the fact of build quality and materials used.
It seems that the business model here makes developers profit with every phase:
- at the point when house was built and sold
- all those numerous times you will require a fix, roof patch or any other type of work on a brand new house you just bought
All of a sudden, it no longer feels like an investment, but rather a “black hole” with no end in sight for on-going repairs.
But let’s look at this from the evolving technology perspective. Imagine, you could own a house which would be upgradable to be on par with modern technology ?
This evolution is already happening.
How many houses have been pre-wired for Internet back in 2004? And ten years later it has become a standard.
Following Tesla’s software-for-a-car model, I can theorize that if the same approach is used with housing, you can achieve significant advancements upgrading materials it was build of and, eventually, replacing the structure with more efficient one in the end of that 20-30 year cycle.
Technological evolution cycles will also shrink in the future, reducing 20-30 year frame to 10-15 year one.
Now, one thing left to achieve is to convert developer companies from selling houses to selling an “upgradable houses” with them as a bundle.