What’s missing: The Rolling Home
This is the fourth installment in my series in which I publish product concepts.
Why not keep the idea for myself? I believe in the power of open communication. There’s a great chance somewhere, someone has a related thought — if so, or in case you have other feedback, let’s connect and learn from each other. Contrary to public perception, ideas on its own are worthless if not paired with the right execution (hard).
Most of those ideas had some incubation time to think things through. This particular thought is from 2017.
Idea
- Build affordable housing by creating a modern re-invention of the RV.
- Core Target demographic is 20 to 30 years old, mostly singles or couples.
Trend Waves
As usual, the market you’re in may matter more than the actual product. There are lots of correlating and long-running trends to be observed:
Move to less inhabitants per household
While our grandparents still lived with their parents under one roof, our society has pushed for individualisation. The moment a young person attains full age, it is deemed as a necessary act of independence to move out and stand on own feet.
Home ownership got less attainable
The homeownership rate among millennials, ages 25 to 34, is around 8 percentage points lower than it was for Gen Xers and baby boomers when they were in the same age group. [Source]
You maybe noticed a small uptick in the last few years in the chart above. While societal pressure hasn’t changed, the reason is that young people can’t afford to move into their own home anymore and stay with their parents.
Home prices rose in parallel to incomes for a long time. This changed in the early 2000s.
In contrast, millennials have less cash saved due to their start in the job market amidst a deep recession. 15% of Britains spend 40% or more of their income on housing. There’s simply no money to buy a house.
Has SARS-2 exacerbated this trend? For sure. However short-lived it may turn out to be, we’re in another economic downturn.
Tiny House movement
Less money + less inhabitants = Tiny house.
Tiny houses (“residential structure under 37 m² / 400 sq. ft”) have received considerable media coverage in the US, including the television shows Tiny House Nation and Tiny House Hunters since 2014.
Has SARS-2 exacerbated this trend? For sure. Tiny Houses induce a feeling of coziness, of one’s own cocoon. Much better than shared flats or high-rise condos in times of contagion.
Digital everything
“The evolution of tiny houses has paralleled the digital revolution, since this whole tiny thing started at the turn of the century,” Jay Shafer of Four Lights Tiny House Company told FoxNews.com. “Once it became possible to have a remote little phone instead of a landline, and a wall-mounted flat screen instead of a 2-foot-by-1-foot chunk on the dresser, folks started seeing the potential for living in what basically amounts to a laptop with a roof.” [Source]
Exactly. Terms like “Digital Nomad” weren’t possible before. Nowadays, almost all knowledge work can be done from wherever there’s an internet connection.
Has SARS-2 exacerbated this trend? For sure. The list of companies giving in to a “remote first” policy is growing rapidly.
Outsourcing of services
Not only do we work digitally, other services are reshaping what is necessary part of a home and what’s not. Remember, space has become precious.
For instance, one report forecasts that by 2030 our homes won’t feature a kitchen anymore: It’s cheaper and more convenient to use food delivery.
There are plenty of other startups that you can summarise under the derogatory term “your-mom-as-a-service” like room cleaning or laundering.
When we are at a point where beds like this are in demand, why not take the logical next step and remove the rest of the house?
As with all trends listed here, I’m not judging, I’m just observing the reality.
RV & Van ownership rate
RV’s in general are on a decade long upward trend: More of them are getting sold and more vacations are carried out with them.
In a mixture of RV and Tiny House movements, a new trend has emerged probably 5 years ago: #VanLife.
People customised existing camper vans with DIY conversion tutorials to get living space for part or even full time use.
Has SARS-2 exacerbated this trend? For sure. Because of it flights are not in favor and vacations get planned nearby home, in driving distance.
And remember the quarantine periods. The cabin fever of having to stay home can drastically be reduced if you could take your home to other places in an instant.
Conscious lifestyle
What are camper vans other than a cool version of this Google employee’s truck? Well, you could argue that while he did it to save 90% of his income, most of today’s folks don’t do it just for the money.
It is seen (or marketed) as a return to timeless and conscious values:
- Only buying and consuming what you need (see Marie Kondo minimalism),
- valuing flexibility and mobility more than the stability a home provides,
- while entrenched into nature (see Fridays for Future climate activism),
- and at peace with oneself (see rise of meditation apps).
The Opportunity
Housing is the biggest thing yet to disrupt. Both in terms of market size / money involved and in terms of culture / lifestyle. Housing shapes our lives more than any other material object.
So why then hasn’t there been more progress? Compare houses with cars. Cars have gotten better and cheaper at the same time. In the summer I joked that I want to sleep in my car because of the luxury of an air-conditioning system.
The automobile industry got industrialised, with all its benefits. The car ecosystem consists of lots of component suppliers, each concentrated on their part. Adam Smith’s division of labor in action.
Building buildings on the other hand stayed highly individual. Every house is a huge project. Without standards, quality and prices vary on a broad spectrum. And like with every tailor-made project, costs can spiral out of control.
Governments tried to combat this with tight regulation — the same regulatory laws that now make it very difficult to enter the market.
We need to bring the industrialisation of cars to housing. Once a home costs half the money, not a lot of people would opt for the old customisable but expensive way.
Starting with mobile cars makes sense from my perspective. The ecosystem of producing standardised modules is already in place. There are ready-made parts even for camping.
Car ownership is heavily subsidised, too. You pay for the ground to build a house on, you don’t pay for the ground to park your car on (in most cases).
The coming move to electric drivetrains enables a single energy source, no fuel generator or else. Pair a cheap bi-directional battery with a big roof for solar panels and you got energy solved.
Cars are incredible important as of today. Will their meaning get diminished by micromobility and car sharing? Maybe, the potential is obvious.
And yet Covid may give car ownership a second life thanks to the safe space compared to all kinds of public transport.
What needs to be solved
Climate
I do think the camper van life can be an alternative, but I also think it gets overly romanticised at the moment. E.g. recycling an old VW ‘Bulli’ is great for the environment and certainly retro stylish, but don’t try to live in there if you aren’t in sunny California.
A car that doubles as a home needs to fit into every climate.
Sanitation
Modern RV’s have nice solutions for sanitation that make up for the lack of plumbing. Still, I think there is room for improvement. In the meantime most will use the shower at work (available at every one of my 7 employers so far). Or use the Gym like this girl.
Residential address
As of today, institutes assume a fixed residential address — although I haven’t received important paperwork in the mail for quite some time. But we need a digital address service to make sure mail will arrive anywhere we are. Startups like vpm scan incoming mail and forward the PDF as E-Mail.
Maybe the biggest task: As with (lonely) remote work we need to make this future a utopian and not a dystopian one. Read this report how Silicon Valley contractors live in RV’s and you’ll see what I mean. There got to be something better than a Honda Civic.
In the best case we will find political and economical solutions to our housing crisis that will ensure everybody a affordable home. Perhaps 3D Printing will be the technological enabler.
Call me a cynic, but I would like to have a fallback in case every one of the trends above continues. Building cars that double as a modern, environment-friendly, efficient and flexible home could be this fallback.
