Mass Production Houses: Q&A with Boxabl’s Galiano Tiramani

In 2017, Galiano Tiramani along with his father, Paolo Tiramani, and Kyle Denman started thinking about ways to improve the “old-fashioned” home building industry. To alleviate the expense and time of building houses by hand using traditional materials, Tiramani founded Boxabl to begin building collapsible, shippable houses that can be mass-produced. He says: “We are working on one of the biggest problems in the world, with one of the biggest markets, our product has the potential to change everything in building construction forever by moving construction to the blockchain. factory mass production assembly.

Tiramani will be one of the speakers at the virtual Builder PropTech event on September 27. BUILDER caught up with the founder of Boxabl to find out what’s next for his company.

BUILDER: Why a folding house?

Tiraman: While 90% of buildings are still made by hand, one at a time, using simple tools, things have to change. Huge problems exist as a result of this “pre-factory” state. We figured out that the main reason homes aren’t mass-produced in a factory is that they’re too big to ship profitably. This means that it was not possible to increase production and it made more sense to build on the ground. Now that we can ship homes that are uncompromised at the lowest possible cost, we can have true mass production like you might see in a car factory.

BUILDER: What can Boxabl houses withstand in terms of disasters, Mother Nature, etc.? ?

Tiraman: The homes are not built using the traditional wood frame construction that you might see in most of North America. We use laminate panel technology that allows them to perform better than traditional structures on almost every level. That means massive energy efficiency, structural strength, hurricane wind ratings, fire resistant coating, water resistant materials, impact resistance, and more. We did this because we wanted to create a universal building system that could work anywhere in the world.

BUILDER: What is your favorite aspect of the Casita de Boxabl?

Tiraman: I love how the Casita has fired people’s imaginations. People get incredibly excited about it, and I think it’s because the Casita looks approachable. They can imagine all the different things they would do with it, and they usually let us know.

BUILDER: Are there any common misconceptions about Boxabl?

Tiraman: Some people think we’re a “tiny house” company…we’re not. However, we started with the smallest room module in our system, which is 20 x 20 feet. This is just an entry point for us. We are planning a room system where we will mass produce different 20′ x 20′, 20′ x 30′, 20′ x 40′ and 20′ x 60′ rooms with different interiors – maybe a kitchen box, a a living room box, bedroom box, etc., which can stack and connect to build most types of single-family and multi-family buildings. Our system should reduce the manufacturer’s development cycle by several months. We provide these universal, architecturally neutral building boxes that the builder deploys and customizes.

BUILDER: What are you most excited about in proptech right now?

Tiraman: I’m glad to stop building houses by hand. Let’s just build houses like we build everything else…on an assembly line.

BUILDER: How is the first factory doing so far?

Tiraman: We started factory 1 about a year ago and we have produced more than 200 houses so far. We have already built factory 2 and will move in soon. I’m about to spend about $15 million on gear upgrades. Everything we do here is new and experimental. We try to proceed carefully (while running at breakneck speed).

BUILDER: What makes the Boxabl factory different from other housing construction factories?

Tiraman: Nothing remains of the traditional construction in our current factory. We do not use wood or nails. But the most important thing… the scale we think we can achieve is probably not possible using traditional factories that ship large capacity homes. We have greatly simplified the assembly of components ranging from thousands of nails and hundreds of small pieces of wood to much smaller components and all cut perfectly with precision by CNC machines which allow us to assemble them quickly.

BUILDER: What do you think is next for Boxabl?

Tiraman: The Boxabl Monster Factory. We are currently planning a third factory which will be a billion dollar factory. This scale will allow us to reach the next level of efficiency, meet the demand for the product and absolutely crush the costs as low as possible.

Learn more about Tiramani online at the virtual Builder PropTech event on September 27.