New Wichita business aims to bring more affordable housing to Kansas

A former chief financial officer of Koch Industries is helping bring a Tulsa-born company to Wichita in an effort to build more affordable housing to Kansas.

The CEO of the Prime Craftsman Homes’ Wichita location, Steve Feilmeier, retired from his chief financial officer role at Koch Industries in 2021 (he remained on Koch’s board until 2024) and began looking into the affordable housing market.

Feilmeier “picked up a USA Today once and read about this company Jake and Amanda Thompson, a couple in Tulsa that had started Prime Craftsman Homes not long ago,” chief marketing officer Kent Miracle said. “(Prime Craftsman Homes was) barely two years old. He went down, visited them, liked them, liked their mission, liked the numbers, realized that you can build really nice, high quality homes that rival or exceed the quality of onsite building for a third less.”

Now the company is expanding to Wichita by building a warehouse on Webb just north of K-96, which Miracle said will help it build homes within a 100-200 mile radius. Prime Craftsman does speculative building and custom building, from studio to four bedroom homes as well as duplexes.

The company has already begun working with Valley Center, with the Wichita suburb changing zoning along Meridian near the high school so Prime Craftsman can build 30 new homes and five auxiliary dwelling units, like studio homes. The homes will be at the southeast corner of 93rd North and Meridian.

Miracle said the opening of the Wichita location, which will hold a ribbon cutting Thursday, will create 75 jobs within the warehouse itself.

“We can easily get to 100 on one shift, and in a few years, if things go as planned and we look at second and third shifts, then that number would just multiply accordingly,” Miracle said. “So we could be upwards of 300 people in a few years.”

Those numbers don’t include field crews, which would be the largest department, Miracle said.

Miracle said there are multiple ways the company saves money on the back end to keep its homes affordable.

The lumber is cut with a laser cutter, which also labels the wood to be put together by an assembly line the following day. Utilizing house moving skates to avoid crane costs and its own trucks to haul the homes, Prime Craftsman Homes is able to save costs to ultimately make less expensive homes, Miracle said. The company says it “will sell a $300,000 home for $200,000.”