Among the industries leading Canada’s tech sector, home construction doesn’t immediately spring to mind. While virtually every other industry, from manufacturing to banking to healthcare, has embraced technology to boost productivity and reduce costs, housing remains relatively analogue, assembled largely on-site and by hand. But an emerging class of Canadian companies hope to modernize the industry and make a dent in Canada’s housing crisis by bringing the speed, scalability, and sophistication of AI and advanced robotics to homebuilding.
“I am optimistic about an ultimate breakthrough. I don’t think it’ll be quick, I don’t think it’ll happen all at once, but I do think we have it in us to do it. We can do hard things.”
Laurent Carbonneau, CCI
With an ambitious goal to double Canada’s homebuilding capacity, the federal government has promised to harness Canadian innovation using factory-built homes as a central pillar of its housing strategy. But bringing homebuilding into the 21st century will take a lot more than simply outsourcing some of the labour to machines.
“If you think about traditional automation like [in the automotive sector], robots have been around for a long time,” said Ramtin Attar, CEO of Promise Robotics during a tour of one the company’s factory in northeast Calgary earlier this month. Calgary
Founded in 2020 by Attar, formerly a research and development leader for construction software firm Autodesk, and Reza Nasseri, a homebuilder, Promise Robotics is based on an understanding that modernizing the homebuilding industry requires much more complexity than a typical automated assembly line. While the robotics used in manufacturing processes for things like cars perform standardized tasks on the same model over and over again, housing is an entirely different beast that requires a high degree of customization, Attar said
Not only do housing designs vary considerably depending on typology—a duplex is different from a four-plex, which is different from a small apartment complex—building codes are wildly different between municipalities and provinces.
“In housing, even in one home, you never build the same thing twice,” Attar said. “So you cannot possibly pre-program the robot.”
RELATED: Promise Robotics opens second factory to help increase Canadian housing supply
To enable a scalable, automated system of home construction, Promise Robotics created its own software system using AI to allow its robots—a combination of German engineering fitted with the company’s bespoke tooling—to “think” their way through as many as 300 distinct steps involved in constructing a single wall. This approach means the company’s system is capable of producing everything from repeatable modular designs to highly personalized custom builds that are adaptable to local conditions and building codes, said Attar. “Our AI models are trained to be able to understand the physical world and generate valid instruction for robots that need to work in a pretty complicated setting.”
In practice, this “physical AI” is expressed as an intricate dance performed between industrial robots that can select and utilize various tools to seamlessly execute tasks. The steps in that dance might be picking up and placing 2x4s, nailing plywood panels, power sawing, and framing, all without the robots hesitating or colliding with each other. On the day BetaKit visited Promise Robotics’ factory, it took about 10 minutes for the system to create a wall from scratch. Using these techniques, Attar said, Promise Robotics can create all the components for a typical two-storey house within a day.
Scaling factory-built homes hard, but “not impossible”
The potential for this speed and efficiency to reduce the labour, time, and cost involved in producing housing has many people excited for the future of the industry, especially government housing agencies. In 2025, Promise Robotics was named the top “Game Changer” in the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Housing Supply Challenge, a nationwide contest aimed at supporting innovation in the housing space. But not everyone is convinced the burgeoning home-tech revolution will be a true game changer for Canada’s housing landscape as it’s currently configured.
Scattershot building codes and differing construction standards across the country represent only one layer of bureaucratic challenge standing in the way of scaling factory-built housing, Mike Moffatt, a housing economist and founding director of the University of Ottawa’s Missing Middle Initiative, told BetaKit in an interview.
Another is the lengthy and often unpredictable approval processes for new residential construction in cities and towns across the country, which can take anywhere from five to 31 months depending on the municipality, according to a new Senate Committee report on the issue.
“If I knock down my house and build another one, I have to have a public hearing, and all my neighbors can weigh in about what type of house is it appropriate for [me] to have or not have, right? And those decisions are all different,” Moffatt said.
Months or years of delay ramp up costs for companies that have to maintain factories and store components until projects are finally shovel-ready, he added. So it’s very hard, but “not impossible” to develop the economies of scale necessary for factory-built homes.
The fixed costs of running and staffing a factory also make housing technology companies more vulnerable to the volatility of the housing market, Moffatt added. Unlike a conventional builder, these companies can’t just scale back operations to cut costs when the market is slow. “They don’t survive recessions particularly well because they’re just inherently less flexible,” he said.
Possible solution to labour shortages
Of course, one way around these challenges is to forego a static factory in favour of something more nimble. That’s the approach of Horizon Legacy, an Ontario-based homebuilder that is pioneering a “mobile factory” model with its proprietary 3D printing robot named VAL (after HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Based on an automotive manufacturing robot and customized for the homebuilding space, VAL can be deployed on site to produce concrete housing components, such as walls, that are considerably more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable than a conventional build, said CEO Nhung Nguyen.
Founded in 1952 as a residential construction company, Horizon Legacy began experimenting with robotics in 2020 in response to the chronic labour shortages the industry faced, said Nguyen. “It seemed absurd at the time,” she said.
Six years later, VAL is not just in operation, but has completed what Nguyen said is Canada’s first neighbourhood built using on-site robotics. VAL was responsible for producing about 30 percent of the components for a 26-townhouse development in Ganonoque, Ont. through a partnership between Horizon Legacy and the town’s local government. Of note, 30 percent of the units will be offered at below market rental rates. “We partnered with the government to do that,” Nguyen said, noting public-private partnerships with housing technology companies could hold considerable potential for social housing.
While it’s true that some municipalities in Canada have resisted new approaches to building or constrained them through an unwieldy regulatory patchwork, Nguyen said many other municipalities are keen to work with companies that can demonstrate their tech creates more, and more affordable, housing.
Nguyen said automating parts of the homebuilding process could also alleviate chronic labour shortages in the construction sector, while at the same time creating a new class of jobs. Horizon Legacy chose not to develop an autonomous robot, but rather one that is operated on-site by humans. This required the company to develop a “robot deployment” workforce, which Nguyen said requires a shorter training period than traditional trades apprenticeships while making the sector more appealing and accessible to women, older individuals, people with disabilities, or anyone who may not have the ability or interest to pursue a career that involves heavy physical labour. “So it opens up the possibility of a different labour pool and expands the capacity of the existing labour pool,” she said.
Construction’s productivity problem
The potential for robotics and other tech to address labour and productivity shortages should convince governments of all stripes to reduce regulatory barriers and invest heavily in developing the industry, said Laurent Carbonneau, VP of policy and advocacy at the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI).
As Canada’s housing crisis has worsened, the housing construction industry has been losing productivity, according to the CCI, contributing just $50 to the economy per hour in 2025, down from $60 per hour in 2020. Meanwhile, one in five workers in construction are 65 or older, meaning the industry faces a shortfall of 500,000 workers by 2030 unless something is done. “Frankly, if we saw that in most other sectors, you’d be screaming that this is like a five-alarm fire for the economy, right?” said Carbonneau.
Beyond boosting productivity, investing in homebuilding technology also has the potential to open up new opportunities for Canadian-made building materials, Carbonneau added. Mass timber, for instance, is a newer building material composed of various wood products; it has recently been approved for use in high rises up to 18 storeys in B.C. and Ontario and up to 12 storeys in the rest of Canada.
“Developers are rightfully very conservative when it comes to adopting innovation. Every building is a $50-million building, and it’s very dangerous to make big mistakes.”
OD Krieg,
Intelligent City
That’s what Delta, BC’s Intelligent City specializes in. Pre-fabricated mass timber components are created in their automated factory and assembled on site—similar to assembling a Lego set. Intelligent City has found the biggest barrier to widespread adoption of the technology isn’t the regulatory environment, but a lack of familiarity and confidence in new building techniques.
“Developers are rightfully very conservative when it comes to adopting innovation, because every building they build puts their business at risk,” said OD Krieg, Intelligent City’s president. “Every building is a $50-million building, and it’s very dangerous to make big mistakes.” Governments can help quell that perceived risk, Krieg added.
Though streamlining municipal approval times and building codes are necessary, Carbonneau said governments could immediately boost the industry by becoming the biggest customer of robotic and factory-built homes in Canada for affordable housing projects. This is one strategy laid out in the new federal Build Canada Homes agency, but it’s not clear yet how the government plans to act on it.
Government procurement of new technology is a strategy that has been successfully used in Europe and the United States to support new industries and solve economic and social problems, said Carbonneau, but it hasn’t been deployed as effectively in Canada. However, with the country in need of 4.8 million more homes by 2035 in order to restore affordability to 2019 levels, he’s hoping the urgency of the housing crisis will be a catalyst for change.
“I am optimistic about an ultimate breakthrough,” Carbonneau said. “I don’t think it’ll be quick, I don’t think it’ll happen all at once, but I do think we have it in us to do it. We can do hard things.”
Jessica Barrett is an award-winning journalist and author of the forthcoming No Place Like Home: The Missing Key To Our Housing Crisis.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
All images courtesy Promise Robotics.