[floxy]

If someone is convinced that all housing is going to stay/become extravagantly expensive, shouldn't they get into real estate development to cash in on the opportunity? So they can build houses/condos/etc. Seems like they could become architects, or real estate agents, or work for (or own) a construction company. Maybe designing robots that build houses. Or work for a REIT.

[hnfong]

There’s a difference between being the owner of a construction business and being an employee. The business owner assumes the risks and upside if real estate is to become expensive, but the employees are mostly affected by supply and demand of other workers - I.e. even if there is high demand of workers in the real estate sector, if there’s a high supply of workers to satisfy the demand, there won’t be a big increase in salary for them.

That said, it does seem people generally are implicitly bullish on housing prices becoming more expensive over time. That’s how to interpret the fact that the first significant investment of many people's savings is a house.

If people held the contrary opinion (that real estate in general are going to deprecate in value) then the idea of buying a house may not be so ubiquitous .

[silverquiet]

I notice a distinct lack of jobs like plumber or carpenter in that list. In some sense my parents are home builders (I'd say it's like a hobby for them), so I have some familiarity with the process. I even fill in some of the labor on occasion. It really doesn't require a lot of administrative work (though they avoid building in places with lots of codes at this point), but a ton of low-paid labor. I don't think any amount of money could ever get me to do concrete work, and pretty much every job sucks in South Texas in the summer, but roofing is the worst on that count. Plumbing and electrician probably pay a bit better at least, but it's still work that is often done by immigrants, so there is some competition.

[floxy]

I hesitated to use the word "construction" on purpose, because invariably someone on HN chimes in how back breaking manual labor is and how it wears out your body prematurely, etc.. :)

>I don't think any amount of money could ever get me to do concrete work

How complex is that work? Might it be a good candidate for machines/robots?

[silverquiet]

I'd think if it was amenable to mechanization, that would have happened in the last century or so. I distinctly remember Mike Rowe doing the job on his show "Dirty Jobs" so that might be worth looking up if you want a good picture of it.

There's plenty of machines involved to transport concrete via trucks and pumps and all that, but it always seems to end up with some grunt holding the nozzle and then lots of labor to ensure there are no voids and the surface is smooth.

I don't really know that much about robots, but the thing about houses is that nothing is really terribly exact - lots of stuff is just off by half an inch or something like that, so a lot of the work just ends up being somewhat custom. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing robots would handle well.

Maybe there's more room for it in prefab type construction? But of course there's a mobile home stigma there.