And it will change little as long as the bottleneck is land and permits. And that the profits on each units are to be maximized.

I also wonder about reliability of such houses - that remains to be seen.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about construction.

I think it'd be great to have some sort of automation in place for the simple & repetitive stuff (bricklaying), but it feels like we're a long way off from fully automated on-site house construction.

Possibly solved with prefabs?

> And that the profits on each units are to be maximized.

Wouldn't this benefit the construction company, since it brings costs down? (i.e. wages, insurance etc

Yes, it would, but it will not solve the actual problem of availability and affordability.

The construction company has little incentive to drop costs by much.

As for prefabs, they are already widely used. What do you think those bricks are, or the big chunks of concrete used for roofs? Or perhaps the components used for balconies?

If you mean to make even more complex patterns, the trouble becomes applicability. Not everyone wants to live in the exactly identical house and most deployments have a quirk or few to adapt.

> Not everyone wants to live in the exactly identical house

Sure, what about when it costs 5-20x less?

At least in boat building you can either have:

A. Boat designed and built by someone random in a shed.

B. Boat mass produced by a company of hundreds of years of tradition and knowledge.

With some rare exceptions, you'll always want the second option. The bugs have been worked out, everything is ergonomic and safe. Easy to find parts even if they are of inferior quality.

I really don't get why houses have such a special attention. It's the most expensive possession people can have and they wanna build in a way that it's even more expensive and prone to error. Imagine if everyone built their own car...

Construction costs are pretty low, it's the land that is expensive. Ao if you reduce the construction cost by 70% it probably reduces the total cost by only 10/20%, and you get something generic instead of something made for you.