Australia Does Not Just Need More Homes It Needs to Build Them Better

We don’t just need more houses. We need to get better at building them.

There is an enormous amount of political noise about housing.

Immigration.

Material costs.

Builder insolvencies.

Housing targets.

Red tape and complexity…all when builders and developers are struggling to find margin.

But I keep coming back to a more practical question:

Why aren’t we more efficient at actually building houses?

I’m a building lawyer.

I’m not a housing economist or a planning expert.

But I spend my working life dealing with builders, trades, consultants, homeowners, contracts, defects, insurance and construction disputes.

And something seems obvious.

We need to think not only about how we build them, but the process that supports efficiency.

The Productivity Commission recently reported that Australia is now completing about half as many homes per hour worked as we did in 1995.

That’s a productivity problem.

And it deserves more attention.

I’m not suggesting I have all the answers but we should be asking how we can build more homes using:

More repeatable processes and designs.

More standardised steps.

More modern construction techniques.

Not because every house should look the same.

But because if we need to build a lot more houses, it seems sensible to ask whether we can stop reinventing the process every time.

I often advocate for a solicitor’s certificate for entering a building contract, that isn’t to slow things down, it is to speed things up, builders want to build but time and time again they are invariably slowed down by homeowners who do not understand the basics of domestic building.

There is another issue.

Builder insolvency.

Every builder that fails takes projects, trades and supply chains with it.

And houses that should have been completed are left unfinished.

So instead of just asking:

How many people are coming to Australia?

Lets also ask:

How efficiently can we build for the people who are already here?

We need more houses.

We need good builders making profits to be attracted to the sector.

And we need homeowners protected.

So we also need to make the whole process of building an ordinary house and all the related steps simpler, more repeatable, more streamlined and more productive to make the hours a building director puts in more focused on building and NOT everything else.

That seems like a conversation worth having.

Think about contracts as a start, the HIA or MBAV standard contracts support efficiency but why not have similar subcontractor agreements that are standardised especially since the changes to building law are causing further uncertainty beteeen builders and trades.

Surely, there should be an efficiency council or building productivity body that meets and advises government regularly, perhaps HIA and MBAV are already engaged there…

But what do you think is the single biggest practical change that could help us build more houses in Australia AND attract more builders by smoothing processes.

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Tagged as:

• building law
• regulatory compliance
• contract law