Housing demand keeps climbing in the U.S., but supply remains bogged down by outdated production methods. Residential construction still relies heavily on site-based execution. Manufacturing, however, has followed a different path, one shaped by the need to manage complexity at scale. “In manufacturing, everything starts with design. In the design, you’re designing for manufacturability,” says Lance Thrailkill, CEO of All Metals Fabricating and co-founder of PRINT3D Technologies. Over time, that discipline has translated into predictability embedded within design decisions, production processes, and incentive structures, not to eliminate variability, but to control it.
Applied to homebuilding, this approach offers a practical framework for addressing the industry’s most persistent constraints. The next productivity leap is likely to come from treating the home as an integrated product system, a shift that creates the conditions to reduce rework, limit waste, and compress timelines while maintaining, rather than sacrificing, quality.
Treat The Home Like A Product Before It Becomes A Project
In a factory, design is not a handoff. It’s a collaboration between engineers and the people responsible for producing what is drawn. The goal is to remove ambiguity and cost drivers before a part ever reaches the floor. “Manufacturing weighs in with engineers during design to make the product optimized for cost-effectiveness and manufacturability,” he says.
Homebuilding often starts with a similar cast of characters, architects, engineers, builders, but coordination tends to happen later. An efficiency-first mindset flips the order, where buildability becomes a design constraint from day one. That includes decisions about standardization, repeatable assemblies, and which activities belong on-site versus in a controlled environment. The design phase becomes the first opportunity to cut costs without cutting quality. When plans anticipate how components will be fabricated, transported, and installed, downstream work becomes simpler, faster, and more consistent. It also helps contractors avoid compensating for uncertainty with excess materials and padding.
Move Work From The Field To Controlled Environments
Manufacturers do not bet production on variable conditions. They control inputs, sequence work, and automate wherever repeatability matters. Homebuilding can follow the same logic by shifting more of the build into factories and micro-factories, then assembling on-site. “Production involves automating processes through utilizing technology both on software and hardware to make parts more repeatable, more consistent, and more cost effective, leaning less on a skilled trade and more on technology,” says Thrailkill. Take bathroom and kitchen pods. Built in a controlled environment, these assemblies can be inspected, tested, and delivered ready to install, reducing dependency on trade sequencing and jobsite coordination.
Distributed approaches will also bring fabrication closer to the development itself. “Qubit has a cool new concept where it’s micro factories that work in an area where they’re distributing the prefab assemblies,” he shares. The concept aligns with manufacturing’s broader mission to create a repeatable supply chain, reducing transportation inefficiency. These approaches require capital, planning, and scale. “Home building is such a large industry and all of these ideas take a lot to get traction and be able to actually be useful,” he says.
Replace Containment With Root Cause Discipline
Rework is one of construction’s most expensive habits, partly because it becomes normalized. In manufacturing, scrap and defects are treated as systemic signals. Teams investigate what happened, why it happened, and what must change so it does not happen again. When issues arise, manufacturers run “a formal investigation that includes a five-why root cause analysis,” then implement “a corrective action at the process level” to prevent recurrence. A real corrective action, he adds, “should eliminate that completely from reccurring. At worst, would drastically reduce it.”
In residential construction, the prevailing response is often to fix the problem, keep the schedule moving, and move on. “They just do what I would call containment,” Thrailkill says. “They fix the issue without addressing the root cause of the issue.” That approach is understandable under tight timelines, but it carries a compounding cost. The same mistakes recur across crews, houses, and developments, slowing production.
Align Incentives For Better Efficiency
Efficiency often comes down to how incentives are structured, and in residential construction those incentives are frequently misaligned. “If a builder is getting cost plus, then they’re not actually incentivized to not have the cheapest bid,” he says. Even when no one is intentionally inflating costs, the model can dull the urgency to rethink processes or pursue meaningful efficiency gains. It’s also important to distinguish between the incentives of trade owners and the incentives of the people doing the work, hourly field workers. “If it’s not being passed down to the people that are executing the work and they’re not sharing in that profit for being more efficient, then why would they do it any faster?”
Manufacturing has long addressed this gap by making performance visible and tying improvement to shared upside. At All Metals Fabricating, Thrailkill’s fabrication business, employees are given clear time targets for each job and visibility into their performance against those benchmarks. When teams consistently beat those targets, they share directly in the upside through performance-based bonuses.
Keeping Pace With Technology
3D printing is compelling because it addresses two pressures at once: the skilled labor shortage and the demand for differentiated design. Traditional mass production often achieves savings through repetition, which can lead to neighborhoods that look identical. Thrailkill acknowledges the tradeoff, but says automation changes the equation. With 3D printing, “you can have all these different architectural features without any additional cost.”
Even with aligned design, automation, and incentives, new methods still face a gatekeeper in code adoption. “Changing municipal code is like steering the Titanic,” says Thrailkill. Responding to the housing shortage at scale requires codes and standards that evolve alongside production methods, with the same rigor manufacturing applies to qualification and compliance. Momentum is beginning to build around ICC 1150, a proposed code for 3D-printed construction, which could mark an inflection point for broader adoption.
Efficiency-first building does not have to mean sameness. If regulatory frameworks evolve to accommodate these methods, they could enable more programmable approaches that allow the industry to deliver both scale and greater architectural variety, while reducing waste.
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