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My guess is that there really are economies of scale in construction but they're exploited by the manufacturers of materials, not the builders. For instance, bu
by sacrosancty 4y ago
My guess is that there really are economies of scale in construction but they're exploited by the manufacturers of materials, not the builders. For instance, builders can now buy a door in its frame instead of hanging it onsite. Also prefabricated wall sections, roof trusses, plasterboard instead of plastering by hand, etc.
- bluGill 4y agoSure, but those have been going on for many decades already. It is very hard to think of something new that can get such an economy of scale - once something is invented you can't invent it again (unless it didn't work the first time - but in that case most reinventions don't fix any of the original problems and so it doesn't work the next dozen times either). We can do some improvements, but those are chasing diminishing returns. It doesn't help that people want to live in a house that looks different from the others in the neighborhood. One reason there are so many small builders is each specializes in about 3 houses, and just builds 1 in each neighborhood. They get good at building those houses while never building the same house twice in any neighborhood. If everyone was willing to live in exactly the same house we could scale a little bit more, but not very much.