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In early 2024, Daniella Glaeze and her husband were under contract to buy a new, traditional three-bed, two-bath home on the northern shore of Lave Travis, 20 miles outside of Austin, Tex.
“Nice and simple,” Glaeze said.
Then they saw a social media post about some 3D-printed homes 15 minutes away in Georgetown. The Glaezes, who both work in tech, decided to pay a visit and tour Wolf Ranch, the world’s largest community of 3D-printed homes. They fell in love with the preciseness of the layer-patterned walls and the sturdiness of the foundation, which they believed would hold up well in potential floods.
“We almost couldn’t believe what we were looking at,” Glaeze said.
The following month, she and her husband were moving in.
There are only several hundred 3D-printed homes in America today — making up less than .0001% of the housing market — but that number is steadily growing. Globally, the market for 3D-printed homes was valued at about $60 million in 2024 and is estimated to reach over $4.5 billion by 2033.
Young buyers like the Glaezes are drawn to home ownership without the heavy maintenance of a traditional home. Plus there’s the energy efficiency. Most of the world’s 3D-printed homes, like those at Wolf Ranch, are made out of a concrete-based formula. Compared to drywall, sheetrock or wood, the material is highly effective at keeping internal temperatures stable.
Wolf Ranch’s 100 homes were constructed by ICON, the world’s leading 3D home printer. In addition to the 270 houses the company has printed in the US and Mexico, ICON has also built barracks at Fort Bliss for the Department of War and is working with NASA to design robots that can print infrastructure on the moon.
And that’s just the beginning. This October, the company raised $200 million from BlackRock and Baillie Gifford.
For Glaeze and her husband, the four-bedroom home they settled into was priced similarly to the traditionally constructed home they were previously under contract to buy. While they did not disclose the exact closing price, four-bedroom homes at Wolf Ranch list around $550,000, according to the community website.
There are eight different models of homes at Wolf Ranch, all of which are one-story and were designed in collaboration with world-renown architect Bjarke Ingels. They are ranch-style and instantly recognizable as 3D-printed because of their curved, ridged walls. It’s a byproduct of the 3D-printing process used to construct them, in which successive layers of concrete are squeezed out like toothpaste from an oversized nozzle.
“It’s almost [like living in] a cave,” Glaeze said. “These homes are built to withstand the test of time and environmental changes — there have been a couple of rainstorms and hurricanes but [we’ve never not felt] safe and secure.
“We have no issues with mold or rodents or any of the other typical things [homeowners deal with],” Glaeze continued. “And it’s not like the big bad wolf is gonna come and blow it away with a strong wind.”
The Glaeze’s home, like the other seven models at Wolf Ranch, has an attached garage, standing seam roof (the only part of the home not made of concrete) and floor-to-ceiling windows. They outfitted theirs with solar panels, though their heating and cooling needs are minimal.
For construction companies like ICON, the appeal of 3D-printing homes lies in the breakneck speed and comparatively low costs at which they can be built.
“Technology has upended every industry, but we’re still building homes the way we did in the middle-frickin’ ages,” Will Hurd, a former Representative from Texas, now President of ICON, told The Post. “We have a tool that can address cost, labor, time and scale — all at once.”
The exact price- and time-savings of an ICON build versus a traditional build vary depending on the type of construction, but the company said it can reduce construction time by an average of six weeks and come in roughly 40% cheaper than the national average.
ICON also said its homes are safer than traditional constructions, with walls that can withstand winds up to 175 miles per hour vs. an industry average of 40. A typical home’s fire rating, which measures how long a barrier can block fire and heat, is about 30 minutes. ICON’s is nearly 180.
Homes like Glaeze’s were printed by Vulcan, ICON’s first generation machine. It looks like an oversized 3D printer with two long parallel tracks and a vertical arm that runs between them.
As the wall-systems are being printed, space is left for electrical, heating and plumbing, which are dropped in after the print is complete.
ICON’s $200 million raise is being used, in part, to fund the rollout of its second generation robot: Titan. It can be set up in under an hour and is ultra-mobile because it’s not constrained to tracks. Titan’s massive crane-like arm, which extends out of the base, can pour concrete walls up to 26-feet tall.
Starting next year, ICON will sell the machine to third-party construction companies across the country for about $1,000,000.
“I am excited to build as many 3D-printed homes as possible,” Hurd said. “This is a way to meet demand, address the affordability issue and [help more] Americans achieve the dream of homeownership.”