Birthed from the pure idea of simply wanting to reduce the cost of homes, a company based in Las Vegas, United States has created a new foldable modular home product that has now amassed $1 billion in pre-orders and a 100,000 person waitlist.

These modular homes, which cost $50,000 (RM207,690 at time of writing), comes complete with a kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom and is cheaper to ship, allowing you to stack them on flatbed trucks and unfold them on site.

According to Galiano Tiramani, co-founder of Boxabl, the foldable homes are meant to be a studio apartments for single occupants or two people.

“The idea is that this would be targeted towards accessory dwelling units, which are becoming increasingly popular in California.

In the United States, Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU) are smaller, independent residential dwelling units located on the same lot as a stand-alone, single-family homes. Or two properties, one big and one small, sharing the same lot.

For Boxable’s “Casita” range of foldable modular homes which command a build up of 375 sq ft, the outer wall folds down into a floor followed by the two side walls and finally a roof that unfolds to cover the top.

Tiramani mentioned in an interview with Forbes that Boxabl’s foldable homes are the new way to build housing that’s better, cheaper, faster and can help solve the worldwide housing crisis.

“The goal of Boxable is to dramatically reduce housing costs by making building construction compatible with assembly line mass production. We see a huge opportunity to transition the world from building by hand, to using the same factory principles that we use for all our other moderns products. Our first product is a 20’ x 20’ prefab studio apartment that unfolds from a shipping container size. We can install it in any customer’s backyard in about an hour,” he said.

He also added that at this point in time, their company that is set up in North Las Vegas can produce thousands of houses per year.

He further explained to Forbes that the original idea to fold the houses came from Paolo Tiramani, one of the founders of Boxabl.

“He built a house using factory-built room modules. He experienced many problems and expenses related to shipping the oversized loads. Traditional factory built housing shops wide load room modules that don’t fit on the highway, this model doesn’t work and we think it’s the reason factory built housing has failed to scale. Shipping wide loads mean extra follow cars, restricted routes, restricted travel times, police escorts and more. Boxabl rooms fold from large 20ft rooms down to small 8ft highway legal loads. This enables a new era of factory built mass production of homes on a scale never done before.”

Boxable made headlines when it was reported that Elon Musk lived in one of their foldable modular homes.

Tiramani concluded “I think the only way to solve housing is with solutions like that are technology oriented. It’s really an issue of supply and demand. If there’s more supply, price will go down.”

“I think the only way to solve housing is with solutions like this that are technology oriented. It’s really an issue of supply and demand. If there’s more supply price will go down,” concluded Tiramani.

Read the full interview with Forbes here.

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