The product is the factory: Cuby’s radical shift in how homes get built

Today’s ResiClub letter is brought to you by acres.com!

In the next 12-24 months, Florida’s housing market will be shaped by where builders are buying land today. By tracking builder land acquisitions, the Acres Home Builder Index provides a snapshot into where the market is headed before land is entitled and homes are built.

Drawing from verified transaction data, this Florida Market Snapshot highlights five years of builder activity: total acreage acquired, land purchase amounts by top builders, and regional concentrations of land purchases that help define Florida’s next development cycle.

On the desert outskirts of Pahrump, Nevada, a factory is being built with an unusual mission: move more of the homebuilding process into a controlled environment while keeping final assembly at the jobsite. The facility is the first U.S. Mobile Micro‑Factory (MMF) from Cuby Technologies and the company’s second operating site globally. Rather than fabricating finished volumetric modules, the MMF produces a complete “kit of parts” from foundation to finishes, accompanied by step‑by‑step assembly instructions. Those kits are packed and shipped in stages within a 150 to 200‑mile radius to be assembled by small local crews.

Cuby describes the MMF as a factory‑in‑a‑box that, operationally, subsumes the role of the general contractor and a long list of trades. The intended result is fewer dependencies, less idling between subcontractors, and a tighter feedback loop between design, production, and site assembly. The Nevada factory, which the company targets for Q3 2026, is already tied to a local developer’s pipeline of 3,300 single‑family homes, offering an early U.S. test of whether the model scales beyond pilots.

The problem Cuby is trying to solve

Residential construction remains heavily reliant on scarce skilled labor, with productivity that has lagged other sectors for decades. Cuby’s co-founder, Aleksandr Gampel, puts it bluntly: “Construction is the world’s most broken industry… It’s the only industry that hasn’t industrialized. It’s the only industry that hasn’t automated.” He argues that reducing skilled labor hours; often a dominant cost component, is the most reliable way to bring down total build costs.

Cuby’s approach, inspired by the Toyota Production System, is to atomize assembly into granular and discrete checks such that four unskilled workers can progress from foundation through finishes in roughly 45 to 60 days. Each step is verified before the next begins, with standardized tools and site setups intended to reduce variability. The company’s ambition is a turnkey, move‑in‑ready product assembled with less dependence on specialty subcontractors.

An explicitly “anti‑gigafactory” stance

Industrialized construction has seen large, centralized bets before. Katerra and Veev raised over $1.5 billion combined and attempted to capture value through vertically integrated, highly capitalized factories. Both struggled with utilization, scaling complexity, and abrupt funding pressures. Cuby is explicit about taking a different route: smaller, distributed MMFs that are meant to be faster to deploy and tied to committed offtake.

“A gigafactory takes many years to build,” Gampel says, noting the cyclical nature of housing demand. “The product is not the house, it’s the factory. Copy and paste hundreds of these.” The company cites an MMF equipment capex of about $7.5 million (land, site infrastructure, and working capital are additional and market‑dependent). The idea is to right‑size fixed costs and position capacity near demand, trimming hauling distances and schedule risk.

Economics and cost posture

Cuby frames cost parity with incumbent builders as the threshold for adoption. The company targets a self‑cost in the $100–$110 per‑square‑foot range, contending that it can match or undercut traditional delivery while offering tighter process control and speed. Management characterizes the potential as ~20% lower costs than top “product” builders on comparable specifications.

The argument is straightforward: compress schedules, standardize tasks, and cut idle time between trades to reduce both direct labor hours and carrying costs. The kits and SOPs are engineered to comply with the International Building Code (IBC), with local calibrations for climate and jurisdictional requirements accounted for in the MMF’s service radius.

Materials and building performance

Alongside process, Cuby emphasizes material and assembly quality. The company says it specifies premium components, including products more commonly used in industrial and commercial construction. The intent is to pair tighter process control with higher‑spec materials to improve thermal performance and durability.

One of the key components that enable Cuby’s capital-efficiency while utilizing high-performance materials is through a vertical integration of all systems. Procurement, manufacturing, building, even minutia such as janitorial services are standardized processes within Cuby’s operating ecosystem. Anecdotally, Aleks has mentioned that Cuby’s individual departments that make up the whole are so effective that Cuby has started offering procurement services to household names in the construction industry, saving them an average of 30% on building materials.

How the system is meant to work in practice

A typical single‑family build can involve coordination across roughly 22 subcontracted specialties. Cuby’s MMF attempts to replace that patchwork with a sequence of digitally guided micro‑tasks performed by a small crew. The work proceeds only when prior checks pass–meant to catch issues earlier and reduce rework. By manufacturing subassemblies in a controlled environment and shipping only what is needed in palletized form, the company effectively applies hyper-efficient manufacturing practices to construction. The methodology materializes to a reduction of jobsite clutter, cutting of waste, and keeping sites moving even when skilled trades are scarce.

Permits and inspections, foundation and utilities, weather windows, and crew reliability are all considerations that Cuby has accounted for in their approach. 

Cuby’s process still hinges on dependable local unskilled labor and site readiness, even as it tries to minimize the need for specialized trades.

What’s different from earlier prefab efforts

Earlier attempts often shipped finished volumetric modules from distant plants or invested heavily in centralized off‑site fabrication. Cuby’s differentiation is its decentralized, near‑site production with on‑site assembly of standardized kits. By keeping factories smaller and geographically closer, the company hopes to avoid the utilization whiplash that plagued larger facilities when orders dipped. Whether this configuration retains its advantages at higher volumes is an open question that the Nevada rollout will start to test.

Evidence to date and the roadmap

Cuby reports more than 800,000 engineering hours invested in its system, with a team of almost 250 folks, mainly engineers, and points to a prototype MMF in Eastern Europe with completed, occupied homes assembled without skilled labor. The company also says it is developing a “factory‑of‑factories” program in China to manufacture MMFs at scale. Management’s stated goal is 100+ MMFs within five to seven years, contingent on demand and capital availability. The Nevada joint venture, with 3,300 homes slated over a decade, represents a longer‑horizon commitment that may provide data on throughput, rework, warranty performance, cost stability, and in‑use energy outcomes.

Potential benefits—and questions to watch

Potential benefits:

• Schedule predictability: Standardized steps and near‑site logistics could cut idle time and reduce variance between starts and closings.

• Labor substitution: Breaking tasks into verifiable micro‑steps may help areas with limited skilled‑trade capacity.

• Cost control: If cycle times compress and rework falls, total carrying costs and contingencies could come down.

• Local effects: Smaller MMFs may enable regional employment at entry‑level wages and keep more spending close to where homes are built.

• Thermal performance: If envelope R‑values ~60 are achieved in practice, operating energy demand could be materially reduced relative to conventional builds.
  

Questions to watch:

• Utilization and offtake: Can MMFs stay busy enough through market cycles without recreating fixed‑cost challenges at a smaller scale?

• Quality over time: Are rework rates, warranty claims, and post‑occupancy performance measurably better than conventional builds?

• Financing comfort: How will lenders, bond providers, and insurers underwrite projects delivered via MMFs, particularly in early markets?

• Workforce model: Can local crews be trained and retained consistently, and does the process remain robust as throughput grows?

• Materials economics: Do premium, commercial‑grade materials remain cost‑effective as volumes climb and as markets differ in code/weather demands?
  

The broader context

Strained housing affordability has pushed policymakers and builders to consider industrialized methods that offer factory‑level consistency without the fragility of long supply chains. Cuby’s thesis sits between fully off‑site modular and traditional stick‑built delivery: manufacture subassemblies nearby, ship standardized kits, and assemble on site with tight process control. The approach borrows elements from automotive lean (sequenced, verified tasks), e‑commerce logistics (short “last mile”), and franchise operations.

Gampel’s formulation—“the product is the factory”—captures the company’s focus on replication. If MMFs can hold cost, schedule, and claimed performance targets across different markets, the model could become a portable capacity tool rather than a single‑plant bet. If not, it may join a list of ambitious efforts that found the sector harder to standardize than it looks on paper.

For now, the Nevada rollout offers a concrete case study: a smaller, distributed factory designed to serve a local radius, ship only what’s needed, and guide on‑site assembly through a tightly controlled playbook. The coming years will show whether that playbook scales and how it performs across cycles, codes, materials economics, and communities.

Cuby is actively building pilot homes across the U.S. with proactive homebuilders/developers to demonstrate its systems and place folks in a queue of potential MMF JVs down the line in their respective local regions. Despite a full multi-year pipeline, Cuby is actively partnering with builders across NV ahead of its MMF launch in Q3/Q4 of 2026. 

At the end of my conversation with Gampel, I asked how developers and homebuilders interested in Cuby Technologies’ procurement or homebuilding services should reach his firm. He said they should email [email protected].

Last week, ResiClub PRO members got these 3 additional housing research articles:

Where Moody's forecast expects home prices across 378 housing markets through 2035

Monthly report: Home price analysis for 800+ metros, 3,000+ counties, 25,000+ ZIPs

Institutional landlords were net sellers of 3,038 single-family homes in the first half of 2025

Home price change for America's 50 largest metro area housing markets

MoM = Month-over-month

YoY = Year-over-year

The chart above originally appeared in our monthly home price report, which we sent to ResiClub PRO members last week.