After a long downturn, Stats NZ figures show building work on the ground finally picking up. Housing is carrying the recovery, Canterbury is leading the regions, and Wellington is still going the other way. New Zealand's building industry has had a rough couple of...
Singapore already has more than 20 robotics and automation solutions ready for construction sites. A new leasing scheme announced in September is designed to get them off the demonstration floor and onto ordinary projects by taking the ownership risk away from...
Builder confidence has dropped to a one year low, two in three builders are using sales incentives and the average 30 year mortgage rate is back above 7%. The American market is showing that building homes and selling them are two very different problems. America's...
The United States, Britain, New Zealand and Canada all need more homes. All four are producing fewer. The specific causes differ in every case. The underlying failure does not, and it is the one thing policy keeps refusing to buy. Line up the four markets and the...
Modular construction has never failed on engineering. It fails on order books. Canada is about to run the largest test yet of whether guaranteed demand is the missing ingredient, and the answer matters well beyond Canada. Six federal sites across Canada are due to...
The Building Safety Levy has been years in the making and lands in ten weeks. The design detail everyone missed is when you actually pay it, and that detail changes who it hurts. From 1 October 2026, England introduces the Building Safety Levy on new residential...
The consent data says recovery. The activity data says the floor has not arrived. If you have ever tried to explain to a client why a strong pipeline does not pay this month’s wages, this is that argument with a country attached. Stats NZ recorded 39,737 new dwellings...
The headline number looks like a collapse. Look closer and it is something more interesting. American builders are choosing to stop, and the reasoning behind that choice is worth understanding before conditions here ask the same question of you. US housing starts fell...
Modular and prefabricated construction is a $150 billion global industry and growing at 7 percent a year. Hong Kong is mandating it on public housing. Japan is using it to offset an ageing workforce. Canada is funding it at scale. Australia is still deciding. At some...
Canada has created a new government body to act as a housing developer, backed by $25 billion and a target to double construction output. It is one of the most ambitious interventions in a Western housing market in decades. Here is what to watch. Most governments...
New Zealand builders have just traded through what industry leaders describe as the worst recession since 1991. Some held their teams together. Some didn't. The ones who held on are now positioned differently. Here is what the evidence shows. New Zealand construction...
Japan's construction workforce is ageing faster than it can be replaced. The country is 20 years ahead of Australia on this curve. What it is doing now, and what it is failing to do, is a preview every building industry needs to watch. Japan has a way of arriving at...
Germany is running short of hundreds of thousands of homes while its construction industry reports a historic lack of orders. Understanding how the most engineering-proud economy in Europe ended up here matters for every building market. There is something deeply...
Labour came to power promising to fix Britain's housing crisis. The plans are ambitious. The construction workforce is not. Here is why the gap between target and delivery keeps growing. When the UK Labour government took office, housing was at the centre of its...
The United States set out to protect domestic industry. Instead, its own builders are caught in the crossfire. Here is what happened when trade policy met a four-million-home deficit. There is a particular kind of irony that runs through America's housing crisis right...
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After a long downturn, Stats NZ figures show building work on the ground finally picking up. Housing is carrying the recovery, Canterbury is leading the regions, and Wellington is still going the other way. New Zealand's building industry has had a rough couple of...
Queensland's building regulator is layering defect trends, licensee risk and warranty claims onto maps to decide where inspectors go. The regional patterns it has released show defects are not spread evenly, and neither is the scrutiny that follows them. Where a home...
A Melbourne builder has grown annual deliveries from 215 to 402 homes in five years after moving almost its entire book into townhouses. The growth is the headline. How the work now arrives, and what it does to output per person, is the part other builders can use....
Census data shows almost four million households with two or more spare bedrooms, and the national housing council is now tracking the figure. No spare bedroom tax is on the table, but the way housing supply is measured is starting to shift. Australia’s housing debate...