Wells Fargo is offering mortgage discounts on 3D-printed homes
Buying a house is already hard. Now imagine getting a discount because your home was printed. Wells Fargo just announced it will start offering mortgages for 3D-printed homes and even give buyers a financial incentive to choose them.
This is something the housing market hasn’t really seen before. So, let’s look into the details.
The deal behind the discount
Wells Fargo is partnering with Icon, one of the biggest names in 3D-printed housing. The bank will offer mortgages for homes built using Icon’s technology and give buyers a 0.5% lender credit (basically a discount on the loan).
It also becomes the preferred lender for these homes moving forward.
For buyers, that’s real money saved.
Icon isn’t just building houses but also selling the machines that build them. Its new “Titan” 3D-printer designed for large-scale construction can print multi-story structures and costs about $899,000.
Developers can buy it, lease it, or reserve one with a deposit and training. Wells Fargo is also offering financing for builders who want to buy these printers.
The trust signal
3D-printed homes have been around for a few years. The problem wasn’t building them but financing them.
Traditional lenders were hesitant because of questions like “Will these homes hold their value?” “Can they be resold easily?” “How do you insure something built this way?”
So even when developers built these homes, getting a standard mortgage wasn’t straightforward. This move changes that.
When a major bank like Wells Fargo steps in, it makes it easier for buyers to actually purchase these homes and signals to the market that the technology is “ready.”
The homes are already selling
A 3D-printed community built with Lennar in Texas sold quickly. Another, larger project is already in development.
And according to Wells Fargo, there’s no clear reason these homes wouldn’t appreciate the same way traditional homes do over time.
That’s one of the biggest concerns starting to fade.
If 3D-printed homes become cheaper, faster to build, and easier to buy, they stop being an experiment and start becoming a real part of the housing market.
Source: CNBC
