Texas home buyers move to 3D printing community

When Lawrence Nozad began his house hunt in Austin, Texas, he never imagined he’d end up living in a home built by a robot.

The 32-year-old Austin native had his eye on an apartment near the city’s downtown for some time, even putting a down payment on one under construction in the St. Elmo Arts District, a hotbed of nightlife and dining.

But construction delays thwarted those plans, and the high costs of continuing to rent meant Mr. Nouzad and his girlfriend, Angela Hontas, 29, set their sights on Wolf Ranch, an innovative new development just north of the city.

Built by Austin-based construction technology company Icon in collaboration with homebuilder Lennar, Wolf Ranch is the largest 3D printed housing development in the world.

The 100-home development, located about 30 miles north of downtown Austin, is being built by Icon’s fleet of Vulcan 3D printing robots, which pour thin strips of concrete to build the walls, layer by layer.

“We had planned to stay in urban Austin for cultural reasons, and we have friends who live pretty centrally,” Nozad says, but when they found out about Wolf Ranch through the civil engineering firm where they work in business development, they were hooked.

“I toured the model home once and that was it,” he said in a recent video interview. “I was on board and kind of decided to buy.”

Earlier this year, Nouzad and Hontas bought the 1,977-square-foot Yorn model at Wolf Ranch for about $487,000. Thanks to a 20 percent down payment and a builder that slashed mortgage rates, their monthly payments were about $2,300, well below what they had planned to spend on a luxury apartment in Austin.

“It’s really exciting to be on the front lines of this change, this revolution. I see my neighbours filming little pieces of content from their homes that are going viral on TikTok,” Nouzad says. “The world is really interested in seeing what change is coming, and I feel so lucky and inspired to be a guinea pig in some ways.”

How does Icon 3D print a home?

In 2018, Icon co-founder and CEO Jason Ballard unveiled the company’s first 3D-printed home, a modest, 650-square-foot, single-story house, at Austin’s South by Southwest festival.

Since then, the company’s technology and production have expanded exponentially, and Ballard believes that as it scales up, Icon could deploy fleets of robots across the country to help alleviate the housing shortage crisis by building homes faster and cheaper than traditional methods.

Icon says it has built more than 140 homes so far using a home-sized robotic printer called Vulcan, which uses nozzles mounted between a pair of gantries to pour hundreds of layers of a specially designed concrete to build interior and exterior walls, much like a soft-serve ice cream dispenser.

The concrete is mixed on-site and fed to the Vulcan through another automated system that Icon calls Magma. Software guides the process, allowing an operator to load a home floor plan that controls the printing process.

According to the company’s specifications, Vulcan can build walls up to 10.5 feet high over a surface area of ​​up to 3,800 square feet.

The system can run 24 hours a day, weather permitting, and takes about a week to print a 2,000-square-foot home, Icon Chief Operating Officer Graham Waitzkin said at a conference in Austin last month.

Currently, Icon’s construction costs are roughly comparable to those of a traditional wall system, but the company hopes to bring costs down as it grows, Waitzkin said.

Earlier this year, Icon unveiled its next-generation 3D printer, the Phoenix. With a nozzle mounted on a single articulated arm that rises from a platform on the ground, Phoenix can print multi-story walls up to 27 feet tall.

Phoenix only requires one operator, who can work remotely or on-site. Icon charges $25 per square foot for wall system projects using Phoenix and $80 for projects that include foundation and roof.

In an interview with Realtor.com at Icon’s model home, House Zero, in Austin, Waitzkin said the company is focused on building homes rather than selling or licensing advanced technology.

“We see ourselves as a technology-enabled builder,” Waitzkin said, and the company believes this is the best way to bring 3D-printed homes to market quickly and gain widespread adoption among homebuyers.

What is life like at Wolf Ranch?

Nuzad, who recently purchased a home in Wolf Ranch, said she and her boyfriend have been thrilled with their new home for about a month now that they’ve moved in.

The three-bedroom, two-bathroom home has an open floor plan, with the kitchen flowing into the dining and living areas beneath a vaulted ceiling.

A long hallway leads from the main living space to the master bedroom, with two guest bedrooms located along the hallway.

“It has a very hospitable hotel feel with long corridors,” says Nouzad, and the open living space is perfect for entertaining, with “a flowing feel that goes from afternoon to evening.”

Noorzad was also impressed that Wolf Ranch’s Iconic Lennar Homes was designed in collaboration with Bjarke Ingels Group, the renowned architecture firm that designed Manhattan’s The Spiral and West 57.

The homes’ concrete-print walls could be replastered for a more traditional look, but most buyers choose to leave them as is. The walls’ subtle ribbing and lack of right angles give the homes a space-age, desert look, like Tatooine in “Star Wars.”

Nouzad sees few drawbacks to the innovative building system, noting that the thick concrete walls keep energy bills low even in hot Texas summers.

Hanging artwork on the walls requires only masonry screws—no fumbling for studs for larger pieces—and Nouzad says the home’s fortress-like walls offer peace of mind in the event of a natural disaster.

“Given today’s prices and what we can afford to spend, there’s a very comfortable and secure feeling to a monolithic cement structure,” he says. “It gives you some peace of mind knowing that if a little tornado comes along and blows the roof off, you can just rebuild it.”

Charlie Coleman, Lennar’s Austin president, told Realtor.com that the company has been “pleased” with the interest from homebuyers so far.

“Aesthetically, these homes are unmatched. They have a unique look and feel. Though they are machine-made, they are warm, inviting and intriguing,” he said in an email.

Coleman declined to comment on specific plans to work with Icon on future developments but said Lennar views the relationship as a “long-term” one.

Meanwhile, Icon’s Ballard has unveiled ambitious plans to bring the company’s 3D printing technology to the moon and beyond.

In 2022, the company was awarded a nearly $60 million grant from NASA for research and development of a space-based construction system to support a sustained human presence on the lunar surface.

“I believe that in the future, robots and drones will build entire neighborhoods, towns and cities, and Lennar’s Wolf Ranch community will be looked back on as the place where large-scale robotic construction began,” Ballard said in a statement.

“There’s still a long way to go, but I believe this marks a very exciting and hopeful turning point in how the world approaches housing.”