🏡 Carbon neutral home construction by 2030

Homestead is hosting the homebuilding of the future.

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The future of homebuilding: Watch our latest On Site video with Onx Homes at its factory in Homestead. 

While the country is facing a housing crisis, South Florida is especially vulnerable. Living costs and rent remain high, while inventory is low. New construction is costly, takes longer, and generates millions of tons of carbon emissions yearly. Not only is the housing industry outdated, it is also adding to the climate crisis. 

What if we can build homes faster, while having them last longer and cost less to build and maintain – all with more sustainable materials that can withstand the strong storms we face each hurricane season? 

“Onx is on the forefront of it,” said Onx Homes Co-Founder and CEO Ash Bhardwaj on the future he sees in homebuilding. The company constructs homes as one system: they build all home components, from the bathroom to the stairs and more, in their own factory. This makes them faster and less expensive to build than the average home.

Watch our latest On Site video series in which we tour their factory in Homestead, where they build modular bathrooms, staircases, ceilings, and more out of sustainable concrete.

BUILT TO LAST  

Onx Homes launched in Texas in 2021 and then in Florida the following year. It has a 150,000-square-foot factory in Pompano Beach that produces key home components, and another Homestead factory, which we toured. Each factory can produce about 1,000 homes a year. You can find Onx homes in Miami-Dade already, with four communities in Homestead with more than 600 homes. 

More than 5,000 Onx homes have been built already. Their proprietary construction system, which includes robotics, can build a house in just 30 days compared to the months-long traditional method. In all, the company says manufacturing costs are about 25% less than the industry standard.

Construction includes a reinforced foundation of sustainable concrete, smart designs such as a bathroom pod manufactured off-site (such as at the Homestead location), electrical and plumbing systems built in, walls to withstand 175 mph winds, and concrete floors and stairs reinforced with prestressed beams. 

Other sustainable home features include thermal insulation from plant fiber, double-impact windows designed for impact-resistant heat, humidity, and storms, and next-generation HVAC which uses advanced machine learning. Homes are built with specifications aligned with Energy Star ratings and come with an EV plug as standard.  

“We are going for speed and we are going for resilience in the home building industry”, Bhardwaj said.  

The management consulting company McKinsey & Company reports that Onx homes have 15-25% lower cumulative emissions over a 60-year lifespan compared to typical homes. Onx says it expects to use 80% recycled material by 2028 and produce carbon-neutral homes soon after. 

TECH TO CHANGE THE INDUSTRY

The homebuilding industry remains largely a manual job that hasn’t been transformed by the major technological changes as seen with the car industry, for example. 

“It’s an inefficient industry,” described Bhardwaj, who has worked in technology for decades and has founded AI-related companies. He said he was surprised to see wood construction for most homes in the United States, compared to other areas of the world where most of the homes were built with concrete. With the climate changes happening, from hurricanes to tornadoes and fires, he saw that “[wood] is not the right material to be building for those climate changes” and decided to focus on concrete technology. 

“I thought this would be a great industry for me to take my skill sets and see what can be done and what can be improved,” he said. 

FLORIDA AS A TEST MARKET

Onx Homes expanded to Florida for two reasons: it is already used to building with concrete and it remains a big market where people are moving to. 

That allows Onx the opportunity to meet the rising demand for housing while offering speedier construction and resilient structures, Bhardwaj noted.   

“And we will be at the forefront as a technology company doing that in the right way,” he added.

PITCH US 

If you have a company or entrepreneur to suggest or an idea to share that relates to building Miami’s future, email us at next@opportunity.miami. We invite you to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on our social media channels. If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can subscribe by clicking here. And if you are new to Opportunity Miami, you can learn about our mission and work here. 

Hope to hear from you. 

– Suzette