3D-Printed, Factory-Built Homes Coming To A Community Near You

California-based 3D-printing construction tech company Mighty Buildings says it’s on a new and ambitious growth trajectory. From Hawaii to Saudi Arabia, it plans to build communities of sustainable, net-zero, 3D-printed houses fabricated in microfactories that can be spun up virtually anywhere in a matter of months.

“The scale economics of our microfactories makes it feasible to build anywhere,” says Scott Gebicke, Mighty Buildings’ CEO. “This microfactory approach is one of the main reasons I joined the company because the scalability is really impressive.”

Gebicke has been at the helm of Mighty Buildings for just three months, following 11 years at manufacturing solutions provider Jabil
JBL
. His deep experience in global manufacturing, green energy, 3D printing, and scaling organizations reflects the next stage of Mighty Buildings’ transformation, which is a shift from its roots in prefab backyard bungalows.

Modular, 3D-printed backyard mother-in-law studios and pool houses put Mighty Buildings on the map. The stylish, move-in-ready units could be lowered by a crane to virtually any southern California location. But the approach had its drawbacks. First, the size of each unit was limited to about nine feet to avoid requiring special trucks. Installation required blocking off roads, and the BtoC model required overseeing the entire process, including the permitting process and contractors.

“We knew the resilience of our 3D printable stone and the design flexibility of our modular approach was scalable,” says Gebicke, “but going directly to consumers with fully modular homes was not our best path to getting our technology out in the marketplace.”

Now the company’s focus is on BtoB partnerships with home developers worldwide to rapidly scale housing communities of 50 to hundreds of units. As developments, rather than single units, Mighty Buildings can deliver on its promise of efficiency in both time, cost, and labor.

Gebicke is tasked with refining the global go-to-market strategy he says will disrupt a marketplace that’s been in place for 150 years and change the way housing developers and builders plan communities.

Scalability of Home Microfactories

This pivot requires selling developers on Mighty Buildings’ home concept.

Rather than units fully finished at a factory, the company’s automated microfactories make home kits for assembly onsite. The Mighty Kit System includes 3D-printed panels, which can be customized to any plan, insulation, and a steel frame.

Mighty Buildings says its homes require a fraction of the skilled labor used in traditional construction, are up to three times faster to complete, and are made to withstand hurricanes, earthquakes, mold, mildew, and insects. They’re made with recycled materials, produce almost no waste, and can come equipped with solar panels and energy storage for zero net energy consumption. Price is about 20% lower than a comparable cinderblock-constructed home.

Mighty Homes are an answer to today’s resource-inefficient, labor-intensive, waste-laden, time-consuming housing construction process, says Gebicke, and they’re attracting developers from the Middle East to the Caribbean.

To date, there is only one Mighty Building home standing complete: the Mighty House Quatro located in Desert Hot Springs, Calif. It’s a two-bed, two-bath, 1,171-sq.-ft. ranch-type home with a swimming pool and fire pit. The development will eventually include 20 homes with accessory dwelling units. Nearly a dozen homes are currently in various stages of construction.

It takes four people three days to assemble the whole watertight envelope of a Mighty House. Inside, however, construction is much more traditional. Installing cabinets, flooring, and finishings are what takes the rest of the time in the estimated four-month building process.

Automated Factory-Built Homes

Home kit production for the current development — and another in Rancho Mirage, Calif., now in the permitting stage — is happening in Mighty Buildings’ new Monterrey, Mexico, microfactory. It’s the first volume-production facility that will soon be producing one home kit a day, the company says.

The highly automated Mexican factory houses four of the company’s proprietary 3D printers with patented printing heads, machines that fill the wall units with insulating foam, other machines that cut and trim wall units, and a finishing paint cell. In a few steps, a home kit is ready to ship.

Gebicke says microfactory efficiency is the key to Might Buildings’ global vision. If a developer wants a 200-home Mighty Buildings community in Vermont, for example, a Mighty Buildings factory can be up and running nearby in the time it takes to clear permitting and prep the land, about six months.

“When it comes to the capital intensity required for these microfactories, it’s much less than most other heavy manufacturing industries,” says Gebicke. An entire assembly line that produces 320 homes a year can cost less than $6 million in equipment, he notes.

Localized manufacturing closer to the point of need is a benefit that the wider 3D printing industry has been promoting for years. Not only are shipping costs and associated CO2 emissions avoided, but production is faster, and companies can implement better quality control measures.

One proposed Mighty Buildings community in the Middle East would involve four microfactories in two locations. “The construction of these mega city projects would include putting a factory right next to where you’re building the houses,” says Gebicke. “You would run that factory for three or four years, build out the development, and then ship the equipment somewhere else.”

Rather than delivering hundreds of build-it-yourself house kits and walking away, Mighty Buildings’ current model is a developer partnership. “In large projects, we would joint venture with the builders, and they would joint venture in the factory. So we have shared incentives through the entire value chain,” says Gebicke.

A key benefit to localized manufacturing for Mighty Buildings is the opportunity for customization without straying from the factory-produced components.

“Because we print panels and we use a steel or laminated timber frame, we technically can design anything,” says Gebicke. “Even within a kit system, you can have 10,000 to 15,000 permutations of house styles just by adjusting the last 5% of the house, such as the configuration, orientation, roof and window styles.”

Not only can the flexible configuration accommodate local needs, but the raw materials used in the factory can also be location-specific. Using desert sand instead of recycled glass in the 3D printable material, for example.

Mighty Buildings’ patented 3D-printing material, called Lumas for “Light Activated Urban Multiform Stone”, weighs 30% less than concrete and is 60% recycled. Despite being proprietary, Gebicke says, it would take only a few months to source raw material with a local chemicals manufacturer, whether that’s in Puerto Rico, Korea, or Australia.

Where’s the market for this type of housing development? Turns out it’s anywhere housing is in demand. Gebicke says there Mighty Building has agreements for hundreds of homes in 10 developments around the world: Hawaii, Florida, Puerto Rico, and several in the Middle East.

“Picking our markets, picking where we’re going to scale, getting the equipment on the ground, and building it out is really exciting,” says Gebicke.

Indeed, anticipation is high for the 2024 completion of the Desert Hot Springs development and whether Might Building can deliver on 3D-printed, recycled, sustainable, and beautiful factory-made housing of the future.