As a 3D mesh model consists of a lot of vertices and polygons and each vertex position is represented by three 32 bit floating-point numbers in a 3D coordinate, the amount of data needed for representing the model is very excessive. Thus, in order to store and/or transmit the 3D model efficiently, a 3D model compression is necessarily required. In this paper, a 3D model compression method using PRVQ (predictive residual vector quantization) is proposed. Its underlying idea is based on the characteristics such as high correlation between the neighboring vertex positions and the vectorial property inherent to a vertex position. Experimental results show that the proposed method obtains higher compression ratio than that of the existing methods and has the advantage of being capable of transmitting the vertex position data progressively.