How Robots Revalue Real Estate
When discussing the effects that robots have had and will continue to have on cities, you mostly hear about self-driving cars, delivery robots, and drones. The most frequent question we are asked is: “Will more people move to the suburbs?” The main assumption behind this question is that, with self-driving cars, people will use commuting time for leisure and work because they won’t have to worry about driving, making their commutes much less painful.
But there are other kinds of robots that will impact cities. Over the last few years we’ve been looking at robots that silently re-organize your living space. Automagically transforming space is intriguing because you can get more use out of the same square footage at near zero cost. These robots will allow us to begin thinking about real estate in three and even four dimensions (length, width, height, and time).
Transforming apartments isn’t new. There are retailers like Resource Furniture whose items focus on specific pieces of transformative furniture, like beds that fold into walls or dining tables that can quickly expand or shrink to the changing needs of their owners. At the Resource Furniture website, you’ll find a reference to Life Edited and our friend Graham Hill. We recently shared our own experience in one of Graham’s 350 square foot transforming apartments. If you go further back and travel to Hong Kong, you’ll find Gary Chang, who upgraded his 344 square foot apartment into a “transformer,” resulting in more storage space than he can use. There are even some examples of flexible storage fixtures that use the Z axes. Robotics takes these ideas further.
Born at MIT, Ori Systems’ first product is an all-in-one robotic dresser, desk, and bed. Ori has solved two big objections to transforming spaces — they’ve lowered setup cost and removed physical effort for transformations.
Much of the innovation is in the robotic components like actuators, sensors, and software. These components don’t add much cost relative to the cost of materials and labor for traditional furniture, and the resulting product can deliver a lot more value than its nontransforming or manually transforming counterparts.
Still operating in stealth, Bumblebee Spaces is the only company we know working to unlock the value of all three (X, Y, and Z) vertices. This volumetric use of space will potentially enable a multitude of additional configuration possibilities.
Another element of these robots is their use of interfaces that you might think of as “AI butlers.” Using artificial intelligence to make homes more functional (and not just “smart”) will unlock infinite possibilities and create a totally new category of living space, one that measures real estate not just by square footage, but also the number of configurations the space can have over time and based on the number and needs of its occupants. Amazon is also working on building “robots for the home,” which will further increase market acceptance of AI and robots moving things around in the home.
We’re fascinated by the possibilities these solutions offer to reimagine increased density, not as sacrifice, but as abundance, and a leap into the future.
Credits: Shaun Abrahamson for drafting and editing with me & Sankarshan Murthy for reviewing.
