Taking It Offline

While tech innovations tend to hog the headlines, a multitude of other real estate start-ups are rebooting familiar concepts in fresh ways to appeal to the millennial generation

- Chloe O' Connor

Back in 1908, retail disruptor Sears Roebuck & Co started selling prefabricated houses via its ubiquitous catalogue. For as little as USD500, or about USD12,000 today – because the company owned the manufacturers – you could get a massive kit to put together your new home, and while the options included little starter cottages, there were also more expensive rambling suburban mini-manses, ranch houses, Colonials and Tudors.

Sears had sold some 75,000 houses by the time they got out of the business in 1940, but over the intervening generations, “prefab” has come to be synonymous with low-quality, cheap and generic buildings.

In 2015, Robbie Antonio decided to change that. With a diverse group of world-class collaborators signed on, Antonio – scion of the Antonio clan, founders of giant Philippine developer Century Properties – launched Revolution Precrafted, a property company starring a line of swank but small modular homes each limited-edition and conceived by a famous architect and/or interior designer that customers can select from their website, order from their proprietary factories, and ship anywhere in the world.

Antonio’s unicorn – it recently became the first Philippine start-up ever to reach a valuation of USD1 billion – sounds decidedly next-gen. But in a way it’s not so different from the Sears catalogue of yore.

And, he’s not alone. He’s the biggest name among a class of disruptors in residential real estate ever-so-subtly adjusting the market to the way people live in a practical manner, offering structural and communal amenities they want rather than flashy new tech they need to learn.