Sourceable has run a piece on Australia's home building recovery stalling, and it is worth ten minutes of your time if houses are your bread and butter. The short version: the bounce everyone was promised has not turned up at the pace the industry budgeted for. For a builder, a stalled home building recovery is […]
Construction award pay rates are back in the news because of what happens at the other end of them: a collapsed residential builder, questions about how its workforce was engaged, and a lot of subbies and employees left working out what they are actually owed. The reporting is worth reading. The part that matters for […]
TL;DR: Going owner builder in Australia means you take on the licensed builder's legal role, not just their margin. Every state and territory sets a dollar threshold above which you need a permit, certificate or approval, and most make you sit an assessment before you can apply. The insurance that matters usually is not the […]
TL;DR: In 2026 most turnkey granny flats in Australia land somewhere between $2,300 and $3,800 per square metre all-in, which puts a standard 60m² two-bedroom build at roughly $140,000 to $230,000 including site costs, approvals and GST. Panelised prefab runs lower, around $1,800 to $2,600 per m² installed. The per-m² rate is higher than a […]
The Fifth Estate has run a video interview with Toby Kent on big ambitions for the Infrastructure Sustainability Council, and if you build houses, decks or shop fitouts you probably scrolled straight past it. Fair enough. Infrastructure means tunnels, rail and water treatment, not a slab on a corner block in Craigieburn. Read it anyway. […]
Altus Group has released its Australian Construction Price Outlook for Q2 2026, the quarterly read on where build costs are heading across the capital cities. Construction cost increases Australia wide have been the quiet killer of fixed-price jobs since 2021, and a forecast like this one is the closest thing the industry gets to a […]
Build Australia has run a piece urging construction firms to rethink how they manage psychosocial risk. If you run a small crew, it is easy to file that under "big-builder problem" and get back to work. It is not. Psychosocial hazards in construction are already covered by work health and safety duties in every state […]
TL;DR: Job management software for tradies replaces the spreadsheet, the group chat and the shoebox of receipts with one place that holds your quotes, schedule, crew, documents and defects. The right pick is mobile-first (you run jobs from a ute, not a desk), built for Australian conditions (GST, NCC references, local standards) and priced so […]
TL;DR: Programs blow out for boring, predictable reasons: dependencies nobody mapped, buffers in the wrong places, weather treated as a surprise instead of a statistic, and lead times discovered the week the material was needed. Build the program from the dependency chain backwards, put float where the risk actually lives (wet trades, inspections, long-lead orders), […]
ABC News has been chewing on a question doing the rounds in Canberra: should Australia copy New Zealand's 83-page building code? Next to the National Construction Code, which sprawls across three volumes, the Housing Provisions and hundreds of referenced standards, an 83-page rulebook sounds like a dream. Less reading, less ambiguity, more time on the […]
