Name: How Sweden’s Housing Factories Could Fix US Home Prices
Uploaded: 2026-03-02T21:32:13.000Z
Duration: 11 min 37 s
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In the far north of Sweden, the marvels of modern manufacturing are on full display.

This looks more like a factory than a housing site.

Transition words & phrases

I hope so, otherwise we would have been failing.

Here at Lindbecks, 500 miles north of Stockholm, houses aren't built piece by piece, they roll off an assembly line.

The company produces roughly 40 units, a a rarity in an industry known for drawn out timelines.

In Sweden, nearly half of single family homes and about 20% of all residential buildings are built this way.

International visitors, when they come to talk to you, what do they say about their own situation?

They say the price is too high, it's too cost, too costly to buy a home, to rent an apartment.

And they come to us to see if our way of doing it is the solution or part of the solution.

It's a growing concern that unites Americans on both sides of the aisle.

America will not become a nation of renters.

You don't have to be in Congress to understand how badly we need to bring down the cost of housing and people on both sides of the Atlantic.

This is more than a housing crisis, this is a social crisis.

Apollo's Housing Affordability Index shows that buying a home in the United States hasn't been this difficult since the over the past decade alone, home prices have doubled and those who can afford to buy are significantly older.

In 2010, the median age of all US homebuyers was 39.

The median age of a first time homebuyer has also climbed to 40.

It's a dynamic that Beata Caranchi, chief economist at TD Bank Group, has spent much of her career analyzing.

It's a large share of the economy in terms of workers it employs, in terms of output.

And then it's important because it's probably the most important thing people think about when they think about affordability, lifestyle, ability to pay for rent or home ownership.

So I know myself when I'm out speaking with our clients, I think it's like the second or third question that comes up is about whether their children will be able to afford a home and what that outlook looks like.

When it comes to housing affordability, the issue comes down to a familiar equation.

Purchasing power on one side, production constraints on the other.

You have pointed to astonishing lack of productivity in the construction sector.

Yeah, it's beyond lack of productivity, it's regressing.

So to build a home, it actually takes more resources today than it would have taken 10 years ago.

Some of that is being related to the regulatory environment, the difference in standards and fees and permitting.

Then the other factors that are being attributed to is in the residential sector, it's largely a small company game, which means they often have 50 employees or less.

And from that perspective, they're going to be slower to adopt innovation.

And there's a very high reliance on doing things the same old way, manual processes.

One innovation that could help break that pattern is what Linbex is doing in Sweden, building homes in factories instead of on site.

And while modular housing production does exist in the United States, it still makes up only about 3% of new single family home construction.

So to what extent, what extent is modular housing, prefab housing, a solution to productivity challenges in the housing sector?

Yeah, it's been cited as having some clear advantages and potentially lowering the cost of housing by 20 to 30%.

That productivity advantage shows up most clearly in multifamily housing, Lynn Beck's specialty.

It's pretty much like if you go to automotive industry, you see machinery, you see people, you see processes and you see computers and robotics and material and so on.

So we produce housing very like other organization produces cars.

We do it indoors year round, eight hours per day.

If I'm a potential client of yours, what are the financial benefits of buying a home from you rather than having someone build my building on site?

With our process, you pay very late in the process, so the interest cost is lower.

Traditionally, you pay for the foundation, you pay for the structure, you pay for the roof and blah, blah, blah.

So you end up with having quite a high cost for the interest and you pay very late with our method.

The second thing is the engagement as a customer in the process.

You don't need to supervise car manufacturing, you don't need to supervise housing done in a factory.

For all the cost advantages that come with manufactured housing, it has also met with resistance, something I myself encountered when advocating for its use while serving in the Canadian government.

One of the policies the Prime Minister campaigned on was building modular housing.

That is a way to get more homes built faster.

I see had people heckling me in the House of Commons in Canada saying, oh, you want everyone to live in a Trailer park?

Is there sort of a stigma about prefab housing?

And there's like some factors, like, you know, prefab, you need wood frames, for example.

And so some people will be, oh, the quality of the construction isn't as good, or, you know, I want to put my personal stamp on it, which you can in prefab, especially with 3D printing and other factors.

In terms of technology, it's not like it was 10, 15 years ago.

So part of it is the stage stigma and part of it is making sure you have the right skills to do this, right to make these design changes and to do it in an economical way so that people don't feel like it's all a cookie cutter factor coming through.

So it's breaking through that mentality of what prefab meant.

It's not just buyer resistance that can be a challenge for manufactured housing.

It's also the need for steady demand in an industry that is notoriously cyclical.

We try to maneuver to have a backlog that is about one year.

We can be one year ahead of what's happening.

And one year is for us, it's a good time to have the backlog that long.

But you need to take in consideration customers who have to wait for one year before we can hand over the next project.

And if we see market going down, we need to address other kind of products so we can fill the production flow with projects.

And then there's the issue of regulation, something not unique to North America when it comes to home building.

Elizabeth Svantesson is finance minister of Sweden.

Everywhere you go in, certainly in the western industrialized world, housing, especially the ability of young people to afford a home is a pressing political issue.

It's something you and I talked about as finance ministers.

It's a big issue, especially in bigger cities.

Many young people feel they don't really can afford to move quite early.

But it's difficult to afford it because the prices have risen so much.

One of the largest problem in the housing market is it is over regulated.

So rules added, rules added new rules all the time and that makes it difficult and very expensive to build.

Tell me a little bit about what you've done on cutting red tape.

Many rules have been added and probably good purpose for every rule, but

all the rules make it very expensive to build.

So that's why we are really trying to do like now you can build like a Swedish house, a small house.

you can live one or two in the house so you can come in, so you can have your own home.

And governments aren't alone in grappling with how to build more and build faster.

It's increasingly seeing affordable housing as both a need and an opportunity.

JPMorgan plays a really big role in affordable housing.