Prefabs won’t save Kiwibuild
Housing Minister Megan Woods was grinning as the four cameramen following her tried to stuff themselves through the narrow doorways of the prefabricated house she was touring.
The house was almost ready to be sawn in half, popped on a truck, and driven up from Petone to Napier on Sunday, before being sold as a Kiwibuild home in a few months. It will leave the factory with carpets installed, painting finished, double-glazed windows fitted, and apparently even water in its toilet.
This imagery is just what Woods needs right now – pictures of her in a hi-vis vest touring the kind of business that many think could really give the troubled housing programme the jumpstart it needs.
The homes in question certainly tick many boxes – they will sell for about $150,000 less than the average Napier house and can be constructed in about half the time. The shorter build time is thanks to all the efficiencies that prefabricated housing brings: including overnight shifts, all-season building, and simultaneous on and offsite construction.
The strengths of prefab to help deliver something out of the troubled Kiwibuild scheme have long been talked up by both the industry and the Government, eager to make the intuitive point: when you build something generic in a factory it is a lot quicker and cheaper.
But the Ad build factory that Woods was touring yesterday is delivering just 10 homes for Kiwibuild at this point.
Its innovations are clearly useful and at peak performance the company operating manager says it can deliver about a house every two days, or about 180 a year. The wider prefab industry remains a minnow. An industry survey last year found it was currently delivering about 1200 complete houses a year, about 3 per cent of the
33,000 residential buildings given consent each year.
But Woods was unable to tell journalists how many of the 10,000 Kiwibuild houses the Government has in its pipeline will come from prefabrication.
The 10-house Napier development is thus far the only development that is using solely prefabricated houses.
The industry has been intensely interested in the huge pipeline of demand Kiwibuild could bring. Knowing the Government wants to build 100,000 cheap homes makes it a lot easier to build a new wing of your factory to help build them. But the early hype has faded as the uncertainty of the programme has increased.
‘‘There are some really great companies in New Zealand, already set up, have capacity, are doing great work in the offsite manufacturing space. Their slight frustration is that Kiwibuild to date has not delivered much certainty or much volume,’’ Prefab NZ chief executive Scott Fisher said. He was hopeful that Kainga Ora, the new Government mega-developer that will launch in October, could simplify things by bringing all of the Government arms that dealt with housebuilding under one roof.
Another challenge for the Government is the industry going out and finding customers elsewhere. There is still plenty of demand for affordable homes in the private market and for prefabricated buildings in education and health. Why wait for Kiwibuild?
Asked if prefabricated housing was ‘‘the answer to Kiwibuild’’, Woods replied it was ‘‘part of the answer’’. ‘‘We certainly are looking to bring more in.
‘‘We have been going through a process within Kiwibuild so we can have more offsite manufacturing brought in.’’
At the back of the Petone factory, behind the Kiwibuild houses, three separate floors of a Housing NZ apartment block sat in pieces.
The state house agency appears to be a much more certain buyer than Kiwibuild, and is looking to deliver about 500 units from prefabrication by June 2021.
There might not be certain demand for Kiwibuild houses in the long term but with the public housing waitlist at its highest ever level, there sure is certain demand somewhere.