I wonder if there is a business opportunity here, especially in cities where most people rent their flats:
Imagine that you build a house that contains identical flats. (Or maybe two or three types of identical flats, like there would be a small type A, a medium-sized type B, and a large type C, but all A’s would be the same, all B’s would be the same, and all C’s would be the same.) Then you also build a house with exactly the same types of flats in another part of town, or in a different town.
Now in addition to renting these flats, you offer people the service of hassle-free relocation. Suppose you live in a B-type flat in town X, and you indicate a desire to move to town Y. The owner will tell you when a B-type flat in town Y is available, and will help you move things. That is: they will completely clear the destination flat, provide you lots of boxes to put your property into, optionally provide a temporary place to stay during the relocation, then they will photograph the positions of the furniture in your original flat, move all the furniture into your new flat and put it in exactly the same position (unless you agree otherwise), and bring the boxes there for you to unpack. It would be almost as if your flat was teleported to the new location.
Of course this all would happens for a fee, but I think it could be more convenient and/or cheaper than the traditional way. First, there is a lot of uncertainty removed: if both the old and the new flats are owned by the same company, you don’t have to worry about quality and hidden defects; if your overall experience was good at the old place, it will likely be good at the new place. Second, there is much less negotiation: you never meet the previous owner of your new flat, you don’t even need to sign a new contract, you just pay a one-time relocation fee, and maybe your rent changes because the costs in town Y are different than in town X, but otherwise everything stays the same. Third, if the company does this routinely, they can become more efficient about it.
The company could even give you a “preview” of what it is like to live at the new place (rent you a temporary room in the new location for a month, while your original flat remains untouched until you make your final decision), so you could experience the town Y and decide whether you actually like it.
Yes. I also sorta daydream about similar things. With real estate we’ve got this archaic model mired in all these artificial rules and barriers and intermediaries who are legally allowed to consume a chunk from every transaction.
A proper setup would be, well, once we get robotics to be more flexible and reliable (obviously using the latest breakthroughs in reinforcement learning/neural networks), we’d make everything out of cubical modules like you say.
So you assign the robots to clear a site and the first ones come and demolish anything in the way. Then the next set come and install a concrete foundation and the appropriate base supports. Then the next set install an open framework of girders with however many floors the building will be allowed to have. The framework is made from modules that bolt together in pre-manufactured sections, with obviously a utility/elevator core going up the middle that is prewired and pre plumbed.
Then the buildings functional modules are cubes of a standard size—probably using the ‘fold flat’ technology several startups are working on that makes them transportable in standard dimension trucks—and they come from a factory prefabricated and pre-furnished and designed for the purpose of their occupants. Obviously, the smart, flexible robotics in the factory can build a cube with an interior layout with tens of thousands of permutations, as the materials they need are just in time ordered from other feeder factories by robotic vehicle.
Once on site, most of these buildings have an outer set of rails and a winch system that lets the cube be autonomously raised and then moved laterally to it’s final position while the building is in use.
The cubes are inherently designed to be maintainable by other robotics—all the functional systems inside them are subdivided into modules that can be removed all in one piece, so that maintenance robots don’t have to be very smart, they just go pull the module that self reports a failure or it’s peer modules claim is not responding. (and they come back and replace peer modules and reporter modules if this doesn’t clear the fault)
And yeah obviously as the interior of a cube gets dated, or no longer to the occupant’s needs it gets removed, recycled in a factory, and a new one built. Since robots do 99.9% of the work, costs are cheap and recycling and building a new one (often with used parts from previously recycled modules) is cheap.
I wonder if there is a business opportunity here, especially in cities where most people rent their flats:
Imagine that you build a house that contains identical flats. (Or maybe two or three types of identical flats, like there would be a small type A, a medium-sized type B, and a large type C, but all A’s would be the same, all B’s would be the same, and all C’s would be the same.) Then you also build a house with exactly the same types of flats in another part of town, or in a different town.
Now in addition to renting these flats, you offer people the service of hassle-free relocation. Suppose you live in a B-type flat in town X, and you indicate a desire to move to town Y. The owner will tell you when a B-type flat in town Y is available, and will help you move things. That is: they will completely clear the destination flat, provide you lots of boxes to put your property into, optionally provide a temporary place to stay during the relocation, then they will photograph the positions of the furniture in your original flat, move all the furniture into your new flat and put it in exactly the same position (unless you agree otherwise), and bring the boxes there for you to unpack. It would be almost as if your flat was teleported to the new location.
Of course this all would happens for a fee, but I think it could be more convenient and/or cheaper than the traditional way. First, there is a lot of uncertainty removed: if both the old and the new flats are owned by the same company, you don’t have to worry about quality and hidden defects; if your overall experience was good at the old place, it will likely be good at the new place. Second, there is much less negotiation: you never meet the previous owner of your new flat, you don’t even need to sign a new contract, you just pay a one-time relocation fee, and maybe your rent changes because the costs in town Y are different than in town X, but otherwise everything stays the same. Third, if the company does this routinely, they can become more efficient about it.
The company could even give you a “preview” of what it is like to live at the new place (rent you a temporary room in the new location for a month, while your original flat remains untouched until you make your final decision), so you could experience the town Y and decide whether you actually like it.
Yes. I also sorta daydream about similar things. With real estate we’ve got this archaic model mired in all these artificial rules and barriers and intermediaries who are legally allowed to consume a chunk from every transaction.
A proper setup would be, well, once we get robotics to be more flexible and reliable (obviously using the latest breakthroughs in reinforcement learning/neural networks), we’d make everything out of cubical modules like you say.
So you assign the robots to clear a site and the first ones come and demolish anything in the way. Then the next set come and install a concrete foundation and the appropriate base supports. Then the next set install an open framework of girders with however many floors the building will be allowed to have. The framework is made from modules that bolt together in pre-manufactured sections, with obviously a utility/elevator core going up the middle that is prewired and pre plumbed.
Then the buildings functional modules are cubes of a standard size—probably using the ‘fold flat’ technology several startups are working on that makes them transportable in standard dimension trucks—and they come from a factory prefabricated and pre-furnished and designed for the purpose of their occupants. Obviously, the smart, flexible robotics in the factory can build a cube with an interior layout with tens of thousands of permutations, as the materials they need are just in time ordered from other feeder factories by robotic vehicle.
Once on site, most of these buildings have an outer set of rails and a winch system that lets the cube be autonomously raised and then moved laterally to it’s final position while the building is in use.
The cubes are inherently designed to be maintainable by other robotics—all the functional systems inside them are subdivided into modules that can be removed all in one piece, so that maintenance robots don’t have to be very smart, they just go pull the module that self reports a failure or it’s peer modules claim is not responding. (and they come back and replace peer modules and reporter modules if this doesn’t clear the fault)
And yeah obviously as the interior of a cube gets dated, or no longer to the occupant’s needs it gets removed, recycled in a factory, and a new one built. Since robots do 99.9% of the work, costs are cheap and recycling and building a new one (often with used parts from previously recycled modules) is cheap.