>There's a startup building prefabricated house using robots and cheap labor in a factory,

Not my area but various companies have been trying to do this sort of thing forever. I can remember reading stories about partially pre-manufactured modular homes decades ago and it's never panned out. It seems to be one of those ideas that makes a lot of sense on paper but people don't want it.

I grew up in a Sears & Roebuck home, as were a good portion of those on my block. The Wikipedia article on the subject says that there were 70,000 of them built[1]. So I see this as more of something that has come and gone, probably a few times, and we are back on the up-swing.

The Sears & Roebuck were partially assembled (think wall by wall), and then those parts were hoisted off the freight trains and nailed together. There was still a lot of work that needed to be done (often by professionals), but it really cut down on the (especially local) costs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home

Katerra?

They recently raised $865m lead by SoftBank's vision fund [0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/business/dealbook/katerra...

I think “the last mile” of this process is going to be the hardest to automate.