As enthusiasm for tiny homes grows across the country amid the ongoing affordability crisis plaguing the housing market, a company has come up with a building-in-a-box that can be assembled in 11 minutes for the relatively low price of $8,000.
The foldable, tiny home was originally designed by Washington, D.C.-based CMAX System as an emergency shelter for humanitarian aid; the CMAX Foundation focuses on offering disaster-relief solutions and refugee support. However, with the current state of the market, the building could even be attractive to first-time buyers struggling with high mortgage rates and still-rising prices.
The median sale price of a home in the U.S. in May was $438,483, according to real estate company Redfin, up 4.8 percent compared to a year earlier. At $8,000, the price of CMAX System’s tiny home is 54 times lower than the average sale price of a property at the national level.
CMAX System
“Designed for emergency response yet versatile for any other applications,” Nicolás García Mayor, CEO and founder of CMAX System, says in a video advertising the tiny home.
Newsweek contacted CMAX System for comment by email on Wednesday morning.
CMAX’s tiny home is 19 feet long by 7.4 feet wide and 7.2 feet high—which means most people would fit in comfortably, with some space to spare on the top of their heads.
Most notably, the house doesn’t require any tools to be assembled, unlike Ikea’s furniture. CMAX writes on its website that the tiny home, which is shipped and stored flat, can be assembled from the ground in just 11 minutes by two people.
Despite its small size, the house is “resistant to strong winds” and has a lockable door, according to the company. It can sustain the addition of features such as an air-conditioning unit and/or a water treatment unit at the top of its rigid central structure. Solar panels can also be added by CMAX, though all these additions would cost extra to buyers.
The house can as easily be disassembled as put together, and can be moved around relatively without problems as it weighs only 330 pounds.
Obviously, CMAX’s foldable home is not a permanent housing solution—but the tiny home movement is growing in the U.S., as smaller homes can be much more affordable than larger ones.
Real estate website RubyHome says that there were about 10,000 tiny homes in the U.S. as of January 2024, for an average price of $67,000. Their average size is also much bigger than CMAX’s foldable building, at 225 square feet. That was still 10 times smaller than the average home in the U.S.
Would you consider buying a tiny home to save money? Do you think it’s a good solution for people who can’t afford larger homes? Let us know by contacting g.carbonaro@newsweek.com
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.