Five-Day Townhouse Heralds Era of Disruption

The race is on to build the fastest home in Australia and the latest player is bringing robots into the fray. Northwest Funds is planning five-day homes but that is not the most impressive part of the build. These townhouses cost a third of the price of traditional methods and are better quality, according to Northwest Funds design manager Vanessa Chymiak. Time will tell, and the clock is ticking. The property investor is ready to put its five-day, per dwelling target to the test on a “true modular” 23 townhouse development just south of Brisbane at the end of the May. Northwest Funds’ Vanessa Chymiak says they have been working on the product for more than 18 months and are expecting some heat from the industry. “There’s going to be tall-poppy syndrome, all the builders are going to just be smashing us and nitpicking,” Chymiak says. “So we’ve gone over and above what we need to do but maybe this is our point of difference. “Once the first one is dropped in and fully contained we will get a consultant to do a report because we are pretty confident that we will surpass 10 in our energy efficiency ratings.” Shaking up traditional building conventions Chymiak who is also the chief executive of Built by the Girls says there will always be traditional builds but construction time and prices are soaring. “We know the costs are blowing out, everything is through the roof, trade pricing, basically I could not build a home for the price I built it 12 months ago,” Chymiak says. “There will always be traditional builds and there will always be a market for it but I think the biggest problem… is the housing shortfall and there’s no way we can catch that with a traditional build.” ▲ The kitchen of a modular built house at Lilyfield in Sydney ’ s inner west. Chymiak says you would not see change from $500,000 to build an average single-storey four-bedroom project home. “That’s a big jump, they used to be around $300,000.” The industry is on the cusp of change with multiple players entering the market, each with their own product. AV Jennings last year revealed its 10-week build project with a prefabrication system devised in Australia. The previous Queensland government had announced plans to build modular to support hundreds of regional households ahead of its last Budget. This type of product is becoming more commonplace and when the costs are weighed up there is a compelling case for high-quality builds using newer tech. “I think it’s going to come to the point where people will just see the price point of what they can get,” Chymiak says. “There are so many things you can put into a standard home and still be a third of the cost of a conventional build.” Northwest Funds already completed a pilot for the modular project, which took 12 days to lock up. ▲ The exterior of the pilot project that is seeding Northwest Funds modular home program. Two, three-storey houses were built at Lilyfield in Sydney’s Inner West, including solid oak flooring and marble bathrooms. “To do that as a traditional builder conventionally you’re talking probably around the $3-million mark to build it with all the inclusions and this was built just under $1 million,” Chymiak says. “All the tiling and things like that were done, it was a very limited touch point once it was there.” True modular is not flatpack The Northwest Funds design manager says they have been quietly working in the background putting all this together and it will be scaled. “We’ve looked at quite a few modular type of constructions but were not overly happy with what we saw,” Chymiak says. “We thought we’d do it ourselves and bring together umpteen years of experience in the construction industry “Everyone talks modular but this is basically like a true modular construction, it’s not a flatpack.” The house modules are designed to suit the biggest semi-trailer used in Australia without needing forward traffic control. Plans to scale to Australian production Chymiak says there are five modules per home on average, while some would have 10 depending on the size of the home. “I’m working on some single-storey, four-bed, two-bathroom, double-garage homes for our land estates that we will do, some house and land packages,” Chymiak says. Northwest Funds chief investment officer Peter Turnbull says as a wholesale funds manager they’ve been acutely aware of the pressures within the housing crisis and demand for new homes. “While governments are tackling issues like land supply, approval times, infrastructure, and even encouraging banks to fund modular homes, these measures will take time to filter through,” Turnbull says. “The real bottlenecks remain in approvals, materials, and build times. We’ve been encouraged by Australian-made modular housing efforts, but local capacity is still quite limited. “That’s why we’re investing in modular projects with Australian partners who have several manufacturers capable of delivering hundreds of homes in a single run—a scale that can make a real impact. “It’s taken time, because we’ve been committed to ensuring these are true Australian-standard products, and that’s meant navigating a long process of approvals, design, and testing.” Northwest Funds plans to eventually have a factory in Australia to “push out” with the bulk of homes produced overseas to Australian standards. ▲ Inside the Lilyfield home with its robot-made shadow-line ceiling and high-end finishes. Quality and building codes are a major factor in producing these homes, and these are built by a robot. Chymiak says when she walked through the pilot homes at Lilyfield there was hardly any quality assurance to do right down to the shadow lines. “I was never a modular person, I always worked with the project builders, the developers and I had a heavy design background,” Chymiak says. “When I really started to delve into it, the one at Lilyfield I walked through and I could hardly do any QA on it. “We use the same electrical layouts and systems we use in Australia, it’s all to Australian standards.” The next steps will be to scale the development, create a building code and train a new type of builder. No easy feat. While this 23 townhouse development is a drop in the ocean of housing supply modular homes are already creating more than a ripple effect could be huge. -->

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