Why are there no startups in the real estate construction sector?
As someone who actually worked in construction (excavation in my case):<p>- it is immensely capital intensive <i>at scale</i>. Your average excavator runs in the mid 5 digits, cranes and other specialized equipment way more. If you want to start a nationwide company, no one is stopping you, but be ready to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars before you made a single cent of income.<p>- Staffing is just as bad... you can&#x27;t outsource the grunt work to the cheapest contractor overseas, you need actually certified people on site and most young people don&#x27;t want to work in that area anymore as it is really hard, literally back breaking work.<p>- it is, and that for good reason, extremely regulated by government. No one dies if Facebook is down for an hour because someone fucked up a deployment. Mistakes in construction <i>can cost lives</i> or cause serious bodily harm or damages to nature (e.g. a sewer leaking into a groundwater table).<p>- almost none of it is automatable or in any way &quot;disruptible&quot; by a startup. Sure you can improve a bit by investing in automation or better digital tooling, but the ROI is in the single digits.<p>- most of the industry is decentralized small contractors. You can&#x27;t go viral with construction, you can&#x27;t build monopolies to extract rents later on.<p>- regulations are completely different <i>everywhere</i> on all levels, meaning you can&#x27;t do a &quot;build a standard whitelabel solution and sell it for cheap&quot; job.<p>- most of the industry is extremely local and &quot;knowing&quot; people is how you get business. At the same time, purchasing is extremely local as well. If you want to construct a new home, you ask other home builders on recommendations for contractors.<p>- ETA: Yes of course there are giant companies in the construction world, but these companies don&#x27;t do any small scale shit, these companies don&#x27;t even return calls unless you&#x27;re talking dozens of millions of euros of volume. But you can&#x27;t really &quot;disrupt&quot; these either because of the sheer amount of <i>everything</i> you need just to get off the ground.<p>- ETA2: Another issue is a lot of the trades are run by older people with a ... seriously lacking understanding of modern IT. You&#x27;d be surprised how many essentially run off of Outlook, Excel and a CAD program. You&#x27;ll have a <i>very</i> hard time pitching something to a crowd that has specialized in a specific thing and all but ossified there.<p>- Testing opportunities are scarce. Construction is an insanely risky business, delays causing significant followup costs and penalties, so you&#x27;ll have it even harder to pitch something unevaluated to someone.