Rent your backyard
An architect wants to disrupt the market by creating an Airbnb-style network for pre-built granny flats.
An architect is creating an online network that will allow Aucklanders to rent out their backyards with temporary prefabricated granny flats.
Slimby, or ‘‘shared living in my backyard’’, is a master’s degree project that urban planning expert Tommy Honey is working on at Unitec’s Tech Futures Lab in Auckland.
He aims to bring together homeowners wanting to subdivide their property for rent and tenants looking for transitional housing through a website such as Airbnb.
Honey said the service would be a disrupter in the housing market, as off-site prefabricated houses could be built in a fraction of the time a house would normally be constructed on-site.
‘‘There’s a lot of complexity for people who think they can’t develop their land,’’ Honey said.
‘‘I want to take the friction out of that. It’s like an evolved granny flat, which you can pack up after some years.’’
Honey said homeowners could either buy the dwellings for about $150,000 for a 50-square-metre unit or just set up water and sewage facilities for $25,000, and let the prefabrication company retain ownership and take a cut from the rental income.
He said he was tweaking the model to work with the minordwelling unit restrictions in the Auckland Council’s Unitary Plan. However, as the model stood it did not need permission from neighbours, he said.
Slimby has already garnered interest from some prefabrication firms since the PrefabNZ CoLab conference in Auckland last week.
Homeowners and renters will be able to connect via Slimby’s online platform and dwellings will only be resold through the website.
Honey said prefabricated housing was the future and an answer to the housing crisis, and Slimby could provide transitional housing for Aucklanders as the Government’s KiwiBuild scheme gets under way.
Housing Minister Phil Twyford has said that makers of prefabricated factory-built houses and apartments could deliver 7000 new homes a year to the market.