A Pryda engineer says the reason Australia keeps missing its housing targets is not skills or funding. It is that we still build every home as a one-off. His fix is to build them like cars.
Australia has spent years talking about how to build more homes faster. Bigger targets. New funding. More talk about modern methods of construction. And the data keeps saying the same thing back. We are not getting there.
Adam Dawson thinks he knows why. A chartered engineer and builder solutions manager at Pryda, Dawson has spent two decades looking at construction from the inside, and his diagnosis is blunt. The industry keeps fixing the wrong problem. It treats every home as a one-off project when it should treat homes like products.
Speaking on The Good Builder Podcast, Dawson made the case for a shift that sounds simple but changes almost everything downstream. Stop designing each house from scratch, and start building from a standard, engineered system.
The problem is the process, not the people
Dawson’s argument starts with a picture most builders will recognise. Map out the full build, from a client’s first idea through to handover, and what you find is not a smooth line. It is a mess of handoffs.
“You’ve got so many people that are involved and everyone’s doing a good job of their little piece of it, but we’ve split it out so much that it makes it very hard to innovate,” Dawson said. Improve one task and you might save half a day. You will not solve the housing problem.
He points to a phrase his team sees constantly on drawings. By others. Every time it appears, that is another interface, another handoff, another set of information that has to flow between people who probably are not working together.
“If you actually mapped who’s talking to who and solving what problem end to end, you sort of stand back and go, this is an absolute mess. How do we get anything built?”
His favourite example is the modern facade. An engineer designs the steel to hold it up, does a perfectly good job, then draws a dotted line to wall framing to AS1684, roof trusses by others. Two separate structural systems that somehow have to plug into each other, usually with the frame and truss fabricator left to work out how. Nobody did anything wrong. But nobody designed the whole system either.
Why cars get this right and houses do not
Dawson keeps returning to the car analogy, and for a builder audience it lands.
You would never walk into a dealership and ask for a slightly longer wheelbase or the seats moved back a fraction. If the car in front of you does not suit, you find a different model. You accept that the chassis is fixed, some features are flexible, and the rest is yours to personalise.
Housing works the opposite way. Buyers expect to change almost anything, and the industry lets them, at enormous cost in time and coordination. Dawson is honest that he was the worst offender himself. Building a home for two structural engineers, he and his wife reshaped a standard plan until only the external walls and staircase survived. Twelve weeks went on drafting alone. The build ran fourteen months, and small early changes compounded into roofers returning twice and scaffolding hired for longer than planned.
“You’re not gonna solve a housing crisis going through that process every time,” he said.
The framework he borrows is fixed, flexi and free. In a car, the chassis is fixed, the trim is flexible, and the accessories are free. Everyone’s car still feels like theirs. That is the mindset Pryda is trying to bring to housing.
What Truss House actually is
Truss House is the system built around that thinking. At its core, it turns the structural shell, the roof, walls and floor, into a set of standard engineered components that come together like a large portal frame plated together.
Instead of building bottom to top, you build end to end, stacking braced frames like dominoes. Dawson says builders are getting homes fully framed in a couple of hours, sometimes less. One crew in a Victorian car park, working for a company called Major Timber and Trusses, stood up roof, wall and floor for a sixty square metre dwelling in fifty two minutes. The next goal is zero to lock-up in a day.
This is not the compromise product that the word prefab once implied. As TGB has reported, modular construction has quietly grown up, and engineered timber systems now sit at the sharper end of that shift, with some builders already halving home build times with engineered timber systems.
Because everything sits on a consistent 600mm grid, the benefits do not stop at framing. Services run through predictable voids that go end to end. Cladding, roofing, linings and footings all work to the same grid. Trades moving from build to build already know where everything goes, which removes the on-site guesswork that leads to someone cutting a hole in a truss and creating a structural problem.
The cost story is more nuanced than cheaper. The frames themselves cost more than a standard set, because they are doing far more. The savings show up in total build cost. Dawson describes an electrician who asked not to be quoted and simply billed for time. It came in at about half the usual price, “because there was no roughing in, there was no trying to figure out how do I get this from here to there.”
There is a comfort payoff too. The system needs a wider wall, typically a 300mm cavity, which means far more room for insulation. “A Truss House home is effectively a 10 star home off the bat,” Dawson said, well beyond current code minimums.
The catch: you have to commit early
The trade-off is that this is not something you bolt on halfway. You have to design with the system from the start.
Dawson uses a train analogy. You choose the express or the standard service when you buy your ticket, and the express is fast and smooth, but you cannot jump onto it partway down the line. Architects and designers get handed a kit of parts and a set of rules, and within those rules they can be as creative as they like.
It also reframes what Pryda is asking builders to buy. Rather than ringing a supplier for the cheapest nail plates, a builder brings architectural plans to Pryda and engages them as the engineer. That is a genuinely different relationship, and Dawson concedes it takes builders time to get comfortable with it. His read is that builders are not against change, they just want to see it proven first. “Once a builder sees it, they get it.”
Why this matters beyond one product
Whether or not Truss House becomes the standard, the underlying idea deserves attention from anyone serious about building smarter, not just harder. Standardise one thing, the structural frame, and everything downstream can standardise around it. Drafting, estimating, purchase orders, scheduling. Predictability is what lets you hit payment milestones on time and protect cash flow, which remains the quiet killer of building businesses.
It also speaks to why people leave the industry. Dawson connects the burnout many builders describe to exactly this fragmentation, the stress of holding a hundred moving parts together on every job. Take that complexity out at the base level and you change the daily experience of building, not just the timeline.
Asked the show’s signature question, what makes a good builder, Dawson did not say technology. He said understanding. “The best conversations that we have with builders are the ones that see it straight away. They see all the links through the whole process and they’re not looking at just one part of the build.”
That is the real argument. The homes get built faster because someone finally looked at the whole thing at once.
The Good Builder Take
The headline is the fifty-two-minute frame-up. The real story is the order of operations. Truss House only works if you commit to the system before an architect touches the plan, which flips the usual build sequence on its head. For most builders the question is not whether the frames go up fast. It is whether their design and sales process can start from a fixed kit of parts instead of a blank sheet. Get that right and the speed follows. Skip it and you are back to a one-off with extra steps.
Your Questions Answered
It means designing homes around a standard, repeatable system rather than starting each build from scratch. The structural shell is treated like a fixed product, similar to a car chassis, with defined elements that stay the same and other elements the client can personalise. The aim is to remove the coordination and rework that come with treating every home as a one-off.
Truss House is a framing system from Pryda that turns the roof, walls and floor into standard engineered components that are plated together and stood up like a portal frame. Everything works to a consistent 600mm grid, so services, cladding, roofing and linings all follow the same predictable layout across every build.
Pryda says builders are getting homes fully framed in a couple of hours. Adam Dawson cited one crew that stood up roof, wall and floor for a sixty square metre dwelling in fifty two minutes, with a goal of reaching lock-up in a single day. Those figures are Pryda’s own and should be confirmed before being relied on for a specific project.
The frames themselves cost more, because they do more than a standard set. Dawson argues the saving shows up in total build cost, through faster site works, less rework, fewer trade visits and tighter scheduling. One electrician on a Truss House build reportedly billed about half his usual quote because the service runs were so predictable.
Pryda has done the most work so far on smaller dwellings, granny flats and transportable or modular homes, where the fast site build is a clear advantage. The system has been used on multi-storey dwellings overseas, and larger single and double storey designs are being explored. It suits builders willing to design around a system rather than force a bespoke design into one.
Listen to the full conversation with Adam Dawson on The Good Builder Podcast, and follow The Good Builder for more on how the smartest operators are changing the way homes get built.
Last updated: July 2026
General information only. This article summarises views expressed on The Good Builder Podcast and does not constitute engineering, financial or legal advice. Confirm any product specifications and performance claims directly with the manufacturer before relying on them.
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