Getting personal

The fake credit scores that could cost you a chance of owning your own home

Superyachts used to roll out through the superhigh doors of a West Auckland factory shed. Now it’s Smart Solution Homes’ prefabricated houses.

Fletcher Building opened the doors of its giant ‘‘Clever Core’’ factory in Auckland on Tuesday, allowing the company to turn out hundreds of factory-built homes a year, with scope to increase production.

‘‘Offsite’’ manufacture of homes promises faster homebuilding, a lift in productivity, and, using German machinery, promises an end to shonky building and homes that aren’t weathertight.

But although Fletcher’s factory is the biggest in New Zealand, it’s not the first, and it’s also currently not the factory with the capacity to turn out the most prefabricated homes in a year.

Craig Kellington opened his factory in the former superyacht sheds in Henderson in June last year, and once the last superyacht is trucked out from the shed next door, he’ll be expanding into the space vacated.

The factory channels the Henry Ford production line concept, as homes under construction move week by week from work station to work station along railway lines in the factory until they are completed and trucked away to be installed on site.

‘‘Two to three men can push around an eight-tonne house,’’ Kellington said.

But unlike at Fletcher’s Clever Core factory, the work at Smart Solution Homes involves traditional building techniques.

Come rain, or shine, the building work continued under cover, and developers embracing prefab can get projects done, and move on to the next, faster.

Smart Solution Homes makes ‘‘modular’’ buildings that clip together to make homes and lowrise apartments.

The prefab industry is in growth mode, encouraged by a Government and local authorities that want more homes built and want them soon.

Both Housing Minister Megan Woods and Auckland Mayor Phil Goff were at the Clever Core opening, with Goff saying: ‘‘Why the hell weren’t we doing this 10 years ago?’’

But stigma around the word ‘‘prefab’’ remained, and there was a concerted attempt to rebrand prefab as ‘‘offsite’’ construction, or manufacturing.

‘‘People would phone you up, and they would think it was dead cheap,’’ Kellington said.

That appeared to be a hangover from quality and weathertightness issues of some prefab homes in the 1980s, as well as memories of shivering in winter, and sweltering in summer, in temporary prefabricated classrooms.

There was also a Kiwi obsession with every home being different from its neighbours.

‘‘The countries which succeed in this are those where we don’t have this stigma, where you don’t have to have your home look different to your neighbours’ houses,’’ he said.

While Fletchers intended to take contracts from developers a year from now, the main customer for Clever Core will be Fletcher Living, which develops large subdivisions.

And while its plans were to mass-produce just 12 different home designs, these would be home ‘‘cores’’. Fletcher Living would be able to vary the outer cladding and interior detailing.

When Fletcher Building announced the opening of ‘‘New Zealand’s largest offsite home manufacturing facility’’, Kerry Edwards, chief executive of Christchurch’s Concision factory was bemused.

The Fletcher ‘‘Clever Core’’ facility, housed in an enormous building in South Auckland which used to store sugary soft drinks, was 8500sqm, and could turn out 500 homes a year.

‘‘We are 5300sqm,’’ Edwards said. ‘‘But we are really confident we could deliver over 1000 homes from our facility.’’

The equipment it used was from the same German manufacturer as Fletchers was using.

But Concision had not yet achieved 1000 homes a year because too few developers had twigged to offsite manufacturing.

‘‘We have got excess capacity, and we have had it for a threeyear period,’’ Edwards said.

That excess capacity was currently 60 per cent.

‘‘That hurts a lot, and we are not satisfied with that,’’ he said.

‘‘We have got excess capacity, and we have had it for a three-year period.’’ Kerry Edwards, chief executive of Concision in Christchurch