Not Just Cars…
Tesla is visibly changing the norms for cars and their drivers. At the same time, the company is making a mark on the world of real estate.
Let’s start our exploration in a city where Tesla has just opened a new factory.
Tesla in Austin: Influx of Workers Impacts Real Estate Values
Tesla’s “Gigafactory” in Austin (called “Giga Texas” by the company’s fans on social media) is getting ready to produce hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles. The billion-dollar factory will make Tesla trucks and Model Y cars, as well as batteries. It will be the largest car factory in the United States.
Although Tesla is known for introducing leading-edge robotics to car manufacturing, it still needs construction workers, maintenance workers, and technicians to run the machines. An assembly line worker earning a $47,000 salary cannot pay a half-million dollars for the typical Austin-area home.
Yes, it’s that expensive. Zillow’s figures show a whopping 59% rise in Austin home prices since the start of 2020. No end to this frenzy is in sight. The cost of a home is projected to rise 28.7% over the next twelve months. The surge has a number of causes: lack of builders and supplies, companies buying up property, and all the other dynamics we’ve seen just about everywhere. But Tesla is definitely an additional propeller for the Austin metro real estate market. Investment in and around the Tesla factory, Bloomberg.com reports, has contributed to soaring valuations.
Tesla executives can afford the high prices, but what about the five to ten thousand skilled technicians? And what about the construction workers and other temporary contractors? They simply cannot come up with that kind of money.
And this is why a network of new roads, RV and trailer parks, and tiny, box-style homes are spreading over the landscape surrounding Austin. People are moving to RV-focused places people rarely noticed in the days before Tesla: Oak Ranch and Del Valle, to name two key communities, which add to the park-like vibe around the Austonia RV and Urban Farm.
Austin is not currently the #1 hot real estate market. That slot now belongs to Tampa/St. Pete. And Tesla (along with Amazon) is moving in there, too. While these markets are boosted by employment opportunities, the burning question is where the workers will live.
Lennar, a big firm known for building homes and rentals, with collaboration from the Austin-based ICON robotics company, is envisioning large-scale 3D-printed home developments. The 3D-printed home is mainly a “luxury” technology, but it has been deployed to create affordable tiny homes.
Speaking of which…
Is Tesla’s Tiny House the Next Big Thing?
The Tesla Tiny House that toured Australia is a rustic, boxy trailer with solar-fed Powerwall battery technology and tutorials for owners who learn to store their energy and power their homes year-round. Plumbing, electricity, LED lighting, and air conditioning systems come with the home, ready to plug into local utility connections.
These one-story, expandable studio homes are designed by Boxabl, a builder focused on easily assembled alternative housing, built to fit into shipping containers. The Tesla Tiny House has six solar panels atop a super-strong exterior that’s made of wood and steel. Here’s a picture, courtesy of Tesla’s marketing webpage.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, moved into one of the studio homes, a $50K, 400-square-foot Boxabl Casita, as a primary residence in Boca Chica. Musk reportedly rents the home from SpaceX.
As Musk seems to be a fan of the tiny house lifestyle, Tesla Cybertrucks towing tiny homes could become everyday sights in the not-too-distant future.
Led partly by Tesla investors, a backyard studio maker called Cover hopes to get into the multi-unit housing market. It makes modular houses in a factory, and offers buyers the opportunity to participate in the design, using Cover’s suite of software.
The emerging theme here? Just as Tesla has merged cars with robotics and artificial intelligence, homes, too, will mesh with software. AI-assisted building tech is still quite pricey, but as the idea catches on, it could make housing much faster and easier to supply.
Cars à la Carte?
During an opening party for Giga Texas, Elon Musk unveiled plans to usher in robotaxis in the near future. These software-driven cars will have the capacity to pick up people and take them from place to place — sort of like Ubers without the drivers. And Uber is planning automated taxis of its own, saying the technology will drive the cost of ride-hailing so low that vehicle ownership will one day be obsolete.
There’s no place to park a car in a tiny home, so the trends seem compatible. The idea of car-free homes and autonomous taxis — or even car ownership that comes with a potential income stream if owners wish to lend their self-driving cars to the system — seems plausible around tech hubs.
Some have speculated that the rise of the robotaxi would free up a good deal of downtown parking garage real estate to become housing.
Yet autonomous vehicles (AVs) could also create negative trends.
“[A] world of personal self-driving cars looks very different than a world with fleets of shared ones,” Aarian Marshall writes for Wired. Marshall continues:
If people can sleep or nap or take meetings or answer emails or listen to lectures in their personalized travel pods, they might choose to live even further away from work or school, leading to more urban sprawl. Building sprawling housing, workplaces, and retail, rather than denser housing, workplaces, and retail, could increase emissions and reduce energy efficiency — an unfortunate turn of events as climate change breathes down our collective backs.
So we have yet to see how Tesla’s robotaxi vision will ultimately play out. Will it ease modern society’s pain points, or create new ones? Perhaps once again, as Eric Sevareid quipped back in the 1960s, “the greatest intellectual discovery of this generation is that the real cause of problems is solutions.”
Supporting References
Deeds.com: 3D Building Trend Ramps Up to Meet Housing Shortage (Jan. 5, 2022).
Deeds.com: The Rise of the Digital Pre-Fab Home (Mar. 30, 2022).
Marco Santarelli for Norada Real Estate Investments: Austin Real Estate Market: Prices | Trends | Forecasts 2022 (Mar. 21, 2022).
Brittany Chang for Business Insider: See Inside a New 2,000-Square-Foot 3D-Printed Luxury House in Austin (Mar. 13, 2022).
Lennar Corp. via PRNewswire: Lennar To Build World’s Largest Neighborhood of 3D Printed Homes With ICON (Oct. 26, 2021).
Michael Smith and Shelly Hagan for Bloomberg.com: Tesla Boom Ushers In Trailer Parks, Tiny Homes in Red-Hot Austin (Nov. 3, 2021).
Tesla.com: Tesla Tiny House Marketing Page.
Steven Loveday for Inside EVs: Elon Musk’s Tiny, Towable House (Jun. 23, 2021).
Olga Feoktistova for Google News, Forum Daily – Voice of Russian-Speaking America: Tesla’s Elon Musk Lives in a Tiny House That’s Towable, No Joke! (citing Teslarati and other online sources; Jan. 12, 2022).
Hyunjoo Jin for Reuters.com: Musk Promises “Dedicated Robotaxi” With Futuristic Look From Tesla (April 8, 2022).
Aarian Marshall for Wired.com: You May Be Able to Own a Self-Driving Car After All (Jan. 8, 2022).
And as linked.
Photo credits: Craig Adderley, via Pexels; and Michael Coghlan, via Flickr (CC BY – SA 2.0; no changes made).