Who’s building our dwellings?

This Issue This is a part of the Who's building New Zealand? feature

By - , Build 162

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.

Table 1
Building firms grouped by new dwellings built (year to June 2017)
UNITS BUILTNUMBER OF BUILDING COMPANIESTOTAL NUMBER OF DWELLING UNITS BUILT% OF ALL UNITSAVERAGE 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.

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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.

Table 2
Largest new dwelling builders (year to June 2017)
 NUMBER OF DWELLING UNITS BUILTNUMBER OF BUILDING CONSENTSAVERAGE UNITS PER CONSENTFRANCHISE
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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