Rebuilding the Dream: Unlocking Builder Potential
State governments are scrambling to solve housing shortages, but the real cause of the shortages will continue to sabotage any strategies designed to accelerate home building. While future generations will be deprived from building and owning sustainable homes, it’s a mistake to blame the situation simply on population growth. This is not a crisis of fewer homes being built due to our population size. This is a crisis of the complex regulation sector and its impact on supressing builder numbers.
The history of Australian home building sits proudly with immigrants, those small and medium business owners who contributed to our post WWII building supply. But now for over twenty years we’ve made it
incredibly difficult for this group to participate in an industry they played a significant role in.
The current rate at which regulatory measures are developed and implemented has overwhelmed builders.
Like an antiquated telephone directory, the builder’s rule book grew from 90 pages in the 1980s, to an implausible 300 today.
With 30 years of experience in the industry delivering residential and commercial estates, I have never witnessed as high a level of building insolvencies than in the past six years. During that period, on average, an increase of 17.6% of class 1 builders have gone insolvent each year, compared to a net annual registration growth of just 3.3%. With the population growing by 1.5% a year in the same period, the problem becomes more
apparent. In 2019 we had 411 class 1 builders per million people, as of today, it’s closer to 377. An 8.4% reduction in capacity.
The regulatory constraints become apparent to me in 2017, when I was delivering housing projects for the government. Procuring services for government and obtaining planning approvals became laborious, with ever- increasing delays. Both began to require extensive resources to complete policy rich checklists; from environmental to heritage, from province of materials to socio-economic factors.
Balancing regulations to ensure quality, without affecting affordability is a complex challenge. But it shouldn’t come at the cost of restricting the economic opportunity this industry has brought to so many existing and new Australians. We mustn’t focus on the few big organisations, while neglecting the needs and capacities of the many small, where English may not even be their first language.
Regulations should avoid creating barriers that exclude Small Medium Enterproses (SME) from operating and supporting industry diversity.
I observed firsthand the impact these changes had on small SMEs, as my father, a builder and first-generation Australian, faced significant challenges adapting to them. In the end he had to retire earlier than planned, as it became too hard to keep up.
In 2020, the Victorian Government developed what would become a world first, an automated planning tool – eComply. The moonshot was to make it possible to obtain a planning approval within under a
minute.
The outcome not only proved it was possible but helped highlight the vast opportunity of the global digital landscape for home building. eComply, now evolved into eCheck, is one of the hottest digital products within the North American property market. It was developed by start-up Archistar whose founder was also a byproduct of Lebanese immigrants. eComply wasn’t designed to stop regulation evolving but making it easier to apply. Unfortunately, Australia’s regulatory bodies weren’t ready. We remain in danger, yet again, of losing a technology to a foreign market, while not immediately accessing the benefits it offers, increasing building capacity.
eComply wasn’t designed for big business, but for everyday SME’s wanting to build a home. Yet I remain bewildered why we still have not embraced what this new tool could do to help the current housing supply issue. We don’t have hefty telephone directories or personal phone books anymore, but our housing supply is tethered to the past.
Globalisation and newly acquired knowledge have changed the landscape. This demands more of us. We should not look backwards and halt progress but lean in and find solutions that increase participation at the grass root level. Stoking the entrepreneurial fire of the many is going to be essential to finding the raft of solutions needed. This is a global issue that presents unique opportunities for the construction industry. We simply need confidence to participate in this emerging digital frontier. eComply proves we can, using the universal language of illustrations.
There is a future where we build digital global tools, making regulation accessible no matter where you are or who you are or where you have come from. We can build houses faster, more sustainably and cheaper. But the measure of success should not just be in the volume of sustainable quality homes we build, but the economic opportunity we create along the way. This is about more than just a home.
