3D Printed Houses Priced Up To $600K Fill A 100 Home Texas Neighborhood

As home prices continue to skyrocket, some companies are looking at new methods of building homes to hopefully reduce the strain on the market. Such is the case with ICON, a company focused on building 3D printed houses to combat the global housing crisis.

In other markets, NASA has been looking into 3D printed habitats for future missions to the Moon and Mars, and even had a few volunteers live in a 3D printed Mars simulation habitat for a year. China is also looking into building a Moon base using 3D printed blocks from lunar soil. While that is all and good for future space communities, what about here on Earth? Well, that is where companies such as ICON are beginning to pop up to fill the gap, and potentially help with an ever-increasing problem with affordable housing. ICON touts the method of building homes as being faster, less expensive, requiring fewer workers, and minimizing construction material waste.

“It brings a lot of efficiency to the trade market,” remarked ICON senior project manager Conner Jenkins. “So, where there were maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot.”


When the average person thinks about a 3D printer, they more than likely imagine a unit that can sit atop a desk and print out 3D generated products. ICON’s Vulcan printer, however, is over 45-feet wide, and weighs 4.75 tons. This massive 3D printer has also been busy this summer, printing the last few walls of the first 100 homes in what the company says is the world’s largest 3D-printed community.

The process includes mixing concrete powder, water, sand, and other additives together, pumping it into the printer, and then having a worker squeeze out the mixture onto a foundation (installed in the traditional manner, along with the roof), building up layer by layer along a pre-programmed path which creates corduroy-effect walls. The entire process of printing a single-story three- to four-bedroom home takes about three weeks.

One advantage of the method includes walls that are resistant to water, mold, termites, and extreme weather. The ability to withstand extreme weather is an important aspect of homes built in areas where hurricanes and tornadoes, such as in areas of Texas where the homes by ICON are being constructed.


Lawrence Nourzad and his girlfriend Angela Hontas purchased one of the homes built by ICON in the Wolf Ranch community in Georgetown, Texas. Nourzad remarked, “It feels like a fortress,” while adding he was confident it would withstand most tornados.

While the company touts the homes as costing less to build, the current models available range in price from $450K to $600K. Even with pricing that is not affordable to some, ICON stated more than a quarter of the homes have already been sold. It is possible, however, for less expensive homes to be built in the future using the same method.

One aspect of ICON’s 3D printed homes to keep in mind is Wi-Fi may not work as well as in traditionally stick built homes. This is due to the extreme thickness of the walls. There is a workaround, however, as some current residents are using mesh WiFi router kits, instead of just a single router.