Who’s building our dwellings?
This is a part of the Who's building New Zealand? feature
A breakdown of the figures shows that over 30,000 new residential units were built in the year to June 2017. But who built them – volume builders or smaller enterprises – and how many are multi-units?
WHEN OWNERS or their agents apply for a building consent, they provide a variety of information including the owner’s and builder’s names and the number of units for new residential. The Whats On dataset includes this information for each building consent issued by all councils in New Zealand. Analysing this allows a calculation of how many dwelling units a builder is doing per year.
A few large firms and many small builders
Approximately 25 firms are building over 100 dwelling units each a year (see Table 1). These large firms account for about 24% of all dwellings.
At the other end of the range, about 26% of new dwellings are built by small builders constructing between 1–5 houses a year.
To produce Table 1, an adjustment was made for incomplete data in the consent applications, as about 4% of all consents are not picked up in the Whats On dataset. To allow for this, each size group is scaled up in proportion to their size so that the national consent total is achieved. Because of this, the numbers in the table are approximate and probably slightly low.
UNITS BUILT | NUMBER OF BUILDING COMPANIES | TOTAL NUMBER OF DWELLING UNITS BUILT | % OF ALL UNITS | AVERAGE UNITS PER BUILDER |
---|---|---|---|---|
>200 | 15 | 5,850 | 19% | 390 |
101–200 | 10 | 1,440 | 5% | 144 |
51–100 | 40 | 2,800 | 9% | 70 |
21–50 | 140 | 4,900 | 16% | 35 |
11–20 | 230 | 3,680 | 12% | 16 |
6–10 | 500 | 4,000 | 13% | 8 |
1–5 | 3,100 | 7,780 | 26% | 2.5 |
Totals | 4,035 | 30,450 | 100% | 7.5 |
Source: Whats On dataset, BRANZ analysis.
Who is building what?
The major builders for the past year identified from the Whats On data are shown in Table 2. The counts from the dataset have been rounded to the nearest 5 units as there are slight timing differences between Whats On and the official consent data.
The first column of numbers has the total number of dwelling units for the year. This includes detached housing and all the units in multi-unit developments.
The next column is the number of building consents for the year. Most consents are for a single detached house, but some are for multi-unit developments such as terraced housing and apartments. It is easy to distinguish the two by examining the average units per consent column.
Multi-unit developments
A high number of average dwelling units per consent are typically large multi-unit developments. The builders doing these are commercial type builders such as Kalmar, CMP Ltd, Dominion Constructors and Scarbro Construction.
Summerset and Ryman are retirement village operators. The former is a developer rather than a builder, but the latter has a construction arm.
Traditional detached house
Traditional detached house builders have low average units per consent. Those near the top of Table 2 include G J Gardner, Mike Greer, Fletcher Living and Residential, Classic Builders and Jennian Homes.
These all mainly build detached houses, each with its own consent. However, they are starting to do terraced housing as well, hence the average units per consent is slightly above 1.0 for these builders.
NUMBER OF DWELLING UNITS BUILT | NUMBER OF BUILDING CONSENTS | AVERAGE UNITS PER CONSENT | FRANCHISE | |
---|---|---|---|---|
G J Gardner Homes | 1,240 | 1,190 | 1.04 | F |
Mike Greer Homes | 610 | 495 | 1.2 | |
Kalmar Construction Ltd | 425 | 4 | 106 | |
Fletcher Living & Residential | 480 | 335 | 1.4 | |
Classic Builders Ltd | 440 | 395 | 1.1 | |
Jennian Homes | 315 | 295 | 1.1 | F |
CMP Construction Ltd | 300 | 4 | 75 | |
Signature Homes | 285 | 260 | 1.1 | F |
Universal Homes Ltd | 275 | 195 | 1.4 | |
Stonewood Homes | 265 | 260 | 1.02 | F |
Summerset Group | 265 | 15 | 18 | |
Dominion Constructors Ltd | 250 | 5 | 50 | |
Generation Homes Ltd | 245 | 235 | 1.04 | |
Scarbro Construction | 225 | 1 | 225 | |
Macrennie Commercial Construction | 220 | 3 | 73 | |
Haydn & Rollett Ltd | 180 | 7 | 26 | |
Horncastle Homes Ltd | 180 | 175 | 1.03 | |
Venture Developments Ltd | 170 | 170 | 1.0 | |
Peak Construction | 160 | 150 | 1.1 | F |
Platinum Homes | 145 | 135 | 1.1 | F |
Versatile Buildings | 140 | 140 | 1.0 | F |
Peter Ray Homes Ltd | 120 | 110 | 1.1 | |
Woodview Construction | 115 | 4 | 29 | |
Redican Allwood Ltd | 115 | 5 | 23 | |
Steel Frame Construction Ltd | 110 | 110 | 1.0 | |
Ryman Construction | 100 | 15 | 7 |
Source: Whats On dataset, BRANZ analysis.
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Articles are correct at the time of publication but may have since become outdated.