Experts say prefabricated housing could ease Australia’s housing crisis, offering faster builds and less waste – but warn it will take decades to match overseas success.
After the speaking at the National Housing Solutions Summit Mirvac CEO Development, Stuart Penklis and Building 4.0 CRC CEO Professor Mathew Aitchison went on the CBRE’s Talking Property podcast to talk about some of the major themes from the event.
Mr Penklis said Mirvac have over the last 10 years been on a journey around prefabrication.
“One of our big focuses today, and probably more so than ever over the last 10 years, has been a greater focus around the ways in which we can leverage prefabrication to reduce the time it takes to deliver housing.
“But importantly, and I think it’s very important to stress this point, we do that with a mindset of ensuring that by proceeding down the path of prefabrication we can still deliver choice to our customers and we can still deliver quality, which our brand very much stands for.”
Mr Penklis said one challenge with prefabrication is supply.
“One of the challenges that we’ve certainly had in recent times is just the ability for manufacturers to be able to supply the quantities and volumes that we’ve needed to be able to deliver out our projects.
“And depending on the availability of labour, but also more recently during the COVID period, we’ve found that just some of the costs around labour and materials has impacted our ability to completely proceed down the prefabricated path. And in some instances, we’ve got projects where we have one stage may be prefabricated and the next stage adjoining it may be traditional builds.”
Prof Aitchison said it can take decades to find the capacity and capability in Australia for prefabricated homes. He pointed to Sweden as an example.
“One of the things that we do need to be mindful that it’s taken many, many decades to get that capacity up in the Swedish industry.
“It’s about the belief in innovation, it’s about the belief in continuous improvement and a very long-term view about industry development
“That takes, as I say, decades to develop. So how do we get those two things in sync is something we need to be thinking about.”
Listen to the full episode of CBRE’s Talking Property podcast episode, Shifting the dial on Australia’s housing shortage, here.