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Who here lives in 3-D printed house? Coming soon to Austin


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https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/3-d-printed-houses-are-sprouting-near-austin-as-demand-for-homes-grows-11635240601

 

Spoiler

A major home builder is teaming with a Texas startup to create a community of 100 3-D printed homes near Austin, gearing up for what would be by far the biggest development of this type of housing in the U.S.

Lennar Corp. and construction-technology firm Icon are poised to start building next year at a site in the Austin metro area, the companies said. While Icon and others have built 3-D printed housing before, this effort will test the technology’s ability to churn out homes and generate buyer demand on a much larger scale.

“We’re sort of graduating from singles and dozens of homes to hundreds of homes,” said Jason Ballard, Icon’s chief executive.

If 3-D printing succeeds at this more ambitious level, it could offer a response to America’s chronic shortage of homes for sale, especially in the affordable price range. Mortgage-finance company Freddie Mac estimated that the national deficit of single-family homes stood at 3.8 million units at the end of 2020.

Supply-chain backlogs during the pandemic have pinched home construction, while labor shortages have hampered production for years.

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“Skilled tradesmen are a dying breed,” said Eric Feder, president of LenX, Lennar’s venture-capital and innovation unit. “So there have to be alternative building solutions to help with this labor deficit.”

The vast majority of newly built single-family homes in the U.S. are constructed on-site and framed in wood using traditional construction methods.

Icon’s 3-D printed houses use concrete framing instead. Its 15.5-foot-tall printers can build the exterior and interior wall system for a 2,000-square-foot, one-story house in a week, Mr. Ballard said. The printer squeezes out concrete in layers, like toothpaste out of a tube. The machines can print curved walls, allowing for more creative house designs, he added.

 

Lennar will complete the houses using traditional construction methods. The week it takes Icon to print a wall system is about the same amount of time it takes to frame and drywall a home using traditional construction methods, but Lennar said it hopes it can speed up that process in the future. 3-D printed homes can also be built more cheaply, with fewer people on-site and less waste compared with typical newly built houses, Icon says.

Buyers shouldn’t necessarily count on a discount to the market’s going rate. Lennar hasn’t determined how the homes in the new community will be priced but they will be similar to other Lennar homes in the area, Mr. Feder said. The median home-sale price in the Austin metro area in September was $450,000, according to the Austin Board of Realtors.

Icon has already built 10 two-bedroom homes in Tabasco, Mexico, and seven one-bedroom tiny homes in Austin. Earlier this year, Icon built four single-family homes in Austin with developer 3Strands. Icon has raised $266 million in funding since its 2017 founding. Lennar and home builder D.R. Horton Inc. are both investors.

Trying to scale up 3-D printing technology brings new challenges. Icon’s projects have been permitted by local jurisdictions, but obtaining municipal approvals could be a challenge in new markets, since the technology is unfamiliar. Consumers might also be skeptical of the concept and some might be put off by the look of 3-D printed homes. Icon’s homes, for example, have horizontal ridges in the exterior and some interior walls from the layered printing technique.

On the other hand, buyers are likely to be attracted to homes that are built with less waste, which should translate to cost savings, said
 

In the past, Icon’s houses have been priced at a modest discount to the market rate. Its four-home project in Austin with 3Strands was its first attempt to build two-story houses, using 3-D printing for the first-floor walls while the second floors were conventionally built.

A two-bedroom house in the development was priced at $450,000 and sold for $530,000, said Gary O’Dell, chief executive of 3Strands. A four-bedroom 3-D printed home, meanwhile, sold for nearly $800,000. The homes were priced slightly below comparable houses in the area, Mr. O’Dell said.

 

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Other firms are also rushing to print out homes. Mighty Buildings, a construction-technology company in Oakland, Calif., said it plans to start construction on 3-D printed homes for a 15-lot community in California’s Coachella Valley next year. Preliminary demand for the community has been so strong that Palari Inc., the developer, is planning to add more lots, said Palari CEO Basil Starr.

 

Patchogue, N.Y.-based SQ4D Inc. is currently building a 3-D printed home in Long Island that it sold to a local family for $360,000, above the $299,999 list price, said Kristen Henry, the company’s chief technology officer.

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How do you think 3-D homes will change the real estate market? Join the conversation below.

Home-buying demand has surged during the pandemic, as buyers took advantage of low mortgage-interest rates to find more space to work from home. Home-building activity has climbed in response, with single-family housing starts up 20.5% year to date, according to Commerce Department data.

“I think 2022 is going to be a year where we are going to see a renewed emphasis on innovation,” said Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. “Any productivity gain, any innovation, will help add that additional supply.”

Another way that the labor shortage is leading to automation/innovation. It doesn’t mention where in austin metro they’ll be building them. 

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22 hours ago, ZB'Tejas said:

Well a brand new build in Central Austin is easily more than 1.5M so this would be around half. 

Brand new build of what size?  The article linked says the 2 homes are 30%-55% more expensive per sqft than the average sale in Austin. But I don’t know if that avg number is on new builds or everything. 
 

Id be surprised if it was cheaper.  Wood is usually less expensive than concrete, and I believe most of these use some proprietary mix. How we, I love concrete and brick homes. Built right they’ll last a 1000 years.  

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2 minutes ago, UT_OB1 said:

Brand new build of what size?  The article linked says the 2 homes are 30%-55% more expensive per sqft than the average sale in Austin. But I don’t know if that avg number is on new builds or everything. 
 

Id be surprised if it was cheaper.  Wood is usually less expensive than concrete, and I believe most of these use some proprietary mix. How we, I love concrete and brick homes. Built right they’ll last a 1000 years.  

Avg sale in Austin overall is meaningless. These houses are in central Austin. I have not seen much of anything new build in central Austin less than 1.5M

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Engineering/construction people: is the dream end game of this 3D printing idea realistic? Will we see (in the next 10-20 years) it be normal to have a concrete (or other similarly durable material) foundation and exterior built in a matter of weeks for a small fraction of what it currently costs?  Certainly seems like that’s where they’re trying to go, and it would change everything if say you could get the slab and exterior of a 2000 sf home up in 2-3 weeks for <$50k that would be extremely well insulated and virtually guaranteed last hundreds of years.

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Gonna try to not get too CR here, but the 3D printed homes thing seems like it could be a tool of great good or bad.

As for the good, there are a lot of places desperately in need of affordable housing.  Where I live (mountains of Colorado), prices have been driven up far past what the local economy can support.  A school teacher or someone plowing roads for the county will never own a home at current prices that have been driven up by people making city salaries in Denver and Colorado Springs.  If a 3D printed home can be made for half the cost, these people have a shot to own.

On the other side of the coin, a lot of people here make their living in traditional home construction.  The cost savings of a 3D printed home comes from their labor cost primarily.  If half of them are no longer needed to build a home, what do they do to make a living?  Their jobs are being automated away like a Detroit assembly line worker’s was.

As 3D homes become more mainstream, it will be interesting to see what the ripple effects are.

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55 minutes ago, BottleRocket said:

I read something recently about the world running out of Sand because of demand for concrete. But it’s not like wood grows on trees either.

Running out of sand? They really went all out for Dune I guess 

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10 hours ago, BottleRocket said:

I read something recently about the world running out of Sand because of demand for concrete. But it’s not like wood grows on trees either.

The western 2/3 of Texas a fixin' tah get rich.  That said...

I've read that concrete is out of favor with some in the global warming community.  Something about the CO2 released when you make the quicklime.

https://www.ecori.org/climate-change/2019/10/4/global-warming-has-a-co2ncrete-problem

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Why are a couple of you folks jumping to "affordable housing" with this gambit versus the very obvious and publicly stated benefits of "cutting down build time, supply chain issues and labor bottlenecks while also cutting down on Co2/carbon footprint concerns at the same premium housing price"?

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Don’t expect a big discount for buyers, though. According to Lennar, the 3D-printed homes will be priced similarly to other homes in the Austin area—a city recently described as the “capital of homes selling at super premiums.”

 

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For me affordability of housing is orders of magnitude more important in the big picture than build time/supply chain/labor issues which are likely to resolve themselves before 3d house printing ever becomes widespread. Obviously, the cost of the land a house is built on is independent from how the home will be constructed, and can dwarf the construction costs in desirable locations. But if the end cost is the same,  its an intersting option, but not really a game changer today. I assume  there will be economies of scale associated with the technology if it becomes widely adopted (cheaper "printers", lower labor  etc). But in a supply constricted market, if the builders just stick the extra money in their pockets....who cares? 

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2 hours ago, Blotto said:

But in a supply constricted market, if the builders just stick the extra money in their pockets....who cares? 

A shit ton of blue collar construction workers with years of experience trying to unsuccessfully reinvent themselves as STEM capable skilled labor.

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