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Recently I was approached to do a 300 home subdivision in Long Bay within a 10-year timeframe. It’s hard to know how to respond to this, because although it’s exciting and a huge opportunity, it’s also an impossibility in today’s building industry. I can’t think of any company able to pull this off right now.
We are in the middle of a building boom and desperately short of houses. The Unitary Plan has opened up a whole lot more land for building on (including many back yards) and there are Special Housing Areas, but we are lacking in one area which seems to have been forgotten in the government/council push for achieving their build targets: skilled labour.
The skill shortage runs from council having enough administration, planners, and engineers to process the consents, through to consultants, specialists, and tradespeople in all relevant industries to carry out the work. Everyone is desperately short of reliable, skilled, and committed staff.
To illustrate this point, just think about the Hibiscus Coast Facebook page where there are regular posts by people who say they have been let down by their builder/plumber/electrician’. There are also plenty of requests for someone to “come tomorrow to fix my burst pipe/light”. As you drive around the Coast, you’ll be aware of the staggering amount of trade vehicles on the road. And the amount of advertisements for tradespeople is overwhelming. Everyone in the building industry is busy and frantic.
What does that mean for you? For a start, it means patience and increased cost. Costs for anything building related right now are high, and getting the right trades people costs more. Everything takes much longer, timeframes blow out, many are overcommitted. Networking is incredibly important and the best way to find someone reliable.
In search of a solution, I spoke with Dr Ian Greenwood, an engineer who travels worldwide for his job, and is also a Coastie. I’ve decided he may have a solution for the resourcing issue, but it requires a huge mindset change.
In January, the overseas project Dr Greenwood was working on required the construction of 10,500km of paved roads in 18 months (or around 580km/month). By comparison the new 18.5km road from Puhoi to Warkworth is intended to take five years (or around 0.3km/month). To put that difference in perspective, his project would complete that 18.5km in one day – including an hour for a beer to celebrate a job well done.
When I asked why construction in NZ takes so long, his answer was very enlightening: “My view is that in NZ expectations are often set around what a typical contracting crew can achieve. Whereas places like India and China work in reverse – they say ‘we want this in 18 months’ and make industry ‘resource up’. These countries also think bigger. China let a single contract to build 1000km of rail. Consequently that contractor buys the biggest and best equipment, whereas often in NZ our projects are small, and done with smaller equipment.”
The question then becomes, Is NZ ready for this mindset change? For the building industry to ‘resource up’ to the necessary levels would mean bringing skilled migrant workers in, recruiting apprentices straight out of college, hiring translators – and that’s just the start. Maybe it’s a case of thinking bigger than just looking for someone to build a house, but instead building entire communities, such as the Tamaki regeneration project. Do we, as a community, want this? Or are we happy to slowly grind our way out of the housing shortage? Opinions welcome (email at the top of the column).
