Timber prices have quadrupled last few months.

There is an economy of scale and efficiency in building large prefab pieces of a house on a factory, as opposed to the ad-hoc local conditions. Machines can do a lot on a factory which they cannot do on a traditional construction site, and human labor is not cheap in the U.S., especially if you want licensed contractors to build a house according to the code.

Also, these homes don't look the cheapest edifices you can produce. A part of their value proposition is deployment speed. IDK if it's an important differentiator for that market segment.

I also suppose that such homes can be rolled back nearly as efficiently as they are deployed, several times, so they can serve as mobile homes for disaster relief, construction in remote parts, etc.

My idea is that you cannot have a huge machine that produces a whole wall in one go on a construction site of a single-family home, but you can have it on a factory. And the machine can work like 10x as fast as human builders.

Of course, to be economic, that machine should produce these walls day in day out without much interruption, hence the economy of scale.

Putting walls up is incredibly cheap, that's like the least interesting thing to automate. Plus it'd be hard (read: expensive) to move them from the factory to the site, and it'd be hard to get them into place when they're on site.

For things that are actually hard to build or easy to move, like cabinets or roof trusses, we're already building them in factories

Only if you are building the same wall all the time. As soon as some decides they want their house to not look like the one next door and thus makes some "trivial" changes your machine can't make the house anymore.

That is why you can't scale: people want their house to be unique.

This is exactly what my friend and I have been thinking. People are being priced out of even the cheaper, though still desirable, mountain and other rural communities in the western US. I strongly feel like tiny houses are a good solution for some folks who don't feel like they need 300-400 SF per person in their home. And they can be built to extremely rigorous standards for _relatively_ little cost.

As I've said elsewhere in the thread, we're building one right now (https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR) and our hope is that this somehow is something we can reproduce, potentially on a cheap parcel of land, where people who can't otherwise afford a conventional house can afford these. We're definitely thinking it's for the not-quite impoverished, though, because when people have zero money/jobs you're relying on government to step in and fund/subsidize.

Of course lots of questions about entitlements for tiny house communities; affordability when financing isn't available; etc., but gotta start somewhere. Seems like there's a path to providing some long-lasting shelter for folks who otherwise would have to opt for single or double-wides or, worse, end up unhoused.

If your friend would like to crank out multiple tiny homes, they should look for a company nearby that has automated Light Gauge Steel Framing machines. An example of a manufacturer of such machines is https://www.framecad.com/

Once your design is done, they can easily spit the parts out in an automated fashion, the parts form the wall and roofing panels. The panels are easily trucked to the site and erected.

Not sure if you have in-depth knowledge about this so I can avoid doing a deep dive on the linked site, but what's the cost of something like this? If you were going to do a 20x20 footprint, what would those 4 walls cost if you assume 3 penetrations for a window on each wall and a door on the 4th wall?

Totally get it if you say "go to the website" but if you're involved with one of these companies maybe you could answer that more readily than I can figure it out.