Lennar and ICON finish 100 3D-printed homes outside Austin, and Lennar says costs fell by half along the way

GEORGETOWN, Texas, March 2025 — ICON has finished printing the walls of 100 homes at Wolf Ranch, a Lennar community in Georgetown, just outside Austin. CNBC called it the world's largest 3D-printed community. Here's what happened, what it cost, and what went wrong.

Cost and outcome (as of Mar. 12, 2025)

Outcome: 100 homes finished; about 75% sold, according to the companies. (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)
Cost: Lennar's chairman and ICON's CEO told CNBC the cost to stand it up was slightly higher than anticipated; Miller later said, "We've seen our costs go down by half." No dollar figures were given. (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)
Price to buyers: From just under $400,000. (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)

What was built

ICON says the Genesis Collection at Wolf Ranch comprises one hundred residences along the San Gabriel River in Georgetown. The homes come in 8 floor plans with 24 elevations and range from 1,500 to 2,100 square feet. Each has solar panels on a standing-seam metal roof. (ICON, Wolf Ranch project page)

CNBC reported that the homes come in two- and three-bedroom models. The roof is the only part of each structure that isn't printed. The walls have rounded edges because that's how the printers move the concrete, and the layered surface, CNBC wrote, feels like "hard, wide-wale corduroy." (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)

How the pace changed

ICON started the project in 2022 with two 40-foot robotic printers, according to CNBC. By the second year it was running 11 machines, which cut print time in half and turned out about two homes a week. The systems ran 24 hours a day, and CNBC reported that each printer does the job of more than a dozen construction workers. (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)

"All the learnings about this technology need to happen at scale," ICON CEO Jason Ballard told CNBC. "The truth is in the field, not in the lab." He said ICON had to work out logistics with Lennar's crews, from foundations to wall printing, interior systems and roofing, and called the integration "a real growing up moment for our company." (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)

What Lennar says it cost

CNBC described the community as an experiment for Lennar, the country's second-largest homebuilder. Lennar chairman and co-CEO Stuart Miller and Ballard both said the cost to stand it up was slightly higher than anticipated while they worked through problems. (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)

Miller then said: "We've seen our costs go down by half. We've seen our cycle time go down by half." He didn't say what the baseline was. Lennar is planning a second printed community in Texas with ICON of roughly 200 homes, with larger houses that the companies expect to cost less and go up faster. (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)

Who lives there

Holly Feekings, a retiree who moved in about a year before CNBC's visit, said her electric bill the previous month was $26. "I feel safer in this house than any house I've ever lived in," she said. Around the corner, Pierre Megie said he and his girlfriend were drawn by the energy efficiency, the practicality, the price point and the look. Ballard said all the concrete ICON uses is sourced in the U.S. (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)

What went wrong

Cost more than expected at first. Both executives told CNBC the first community cost slightly more than they had expected. (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)
No baseline for "half." Lennar's claim that costs and cycle time fell by half has no published starting figure, so we can't check it.
Not fully sold. About a quarter of the homes were still unsold at the time of CNBC's visit, by the companies' own figure. (CNBC, Mar. 12, 2025)
What we don't know yet: the actual cost per home, the exact completion date, and whether the second community has broken ground.

Our follow-up question for Lennar

What did a Wolf Ranch home cost to build compared with a conventional Lennar home of the same size, and what is the 'half' measured against?

Sources

ICON, “Wolf Ranch” project page, read Oct. 29, 2026. iconbuild.com
CNBC, “Inside the world's largest 3D printed housing development,” Mar. 12, 2025. cnbc.com

Disclosure: [not in copy] Editor placeholder