Search engines are no longer the only game in town. Builders and trades who understand how AI tools find and recommend local businesses will have a real edge. Those who ignore it will lose work they never knew was available. Something has shifted in how people find a...
The housing market is shifting fast. Sydney and Melbourne are down, smaller capitals are losing steam, and investor appetite is cooling after budget changes to property tax. Industry analysts are sounding the alarm. But the story for builders is more nuanced than the...
Aaron and Emily Pollard sat down to untangle one of the most misunderstood parts of running a construction business. What came out of it is more useful than most marketing courses. Marketing is one of those things the construction industry has always had a complicated...
When external shocks hit the construction industry, builders carry the weight alone. Record insolvencies, rising material costs, and global disruptions are exposing a sector with no meaningful financial buffer. Other critical industries have one. The question is...
If you are a builder, there is a good chance your next client will spend hours researching online before they ever call you. What they do not realise is that a significant chunk of what they are reading was never written by anyone who has stood on a muddy site, dealt...
It is one of the most uncomfortable conversations in construction. Here is a practical framework for delivering the news, managing expectations, and keeping the relationship intact. No builder enjoys telling a client that a build is going to cost more than what was...
Labour is tight. Relationships matter. The builders who get the first call are not always the ones paying the most. Ask any builder what keeps them up at night and the availability of reliable trades is usually somewhere near the top of the list. The structural...
You do not have to become a digital marketer. But understanding what prospective clients actually look at and why they click away matters. Most builders get their work through referrals. Someone who has seen your work, or dealt with you before, tells someone else....
The clauses that protect you when a subcontractor relationship goes wrong and the ones most builders never read closely enough. Most builders have a subcontractor agreement somewhere in their system. A lot of those agreements were drafted years ago, borrowed from...
The data is in. And builders are already putting it to work. The TGB Australian Building Industry Health Report for Q1 2026 has landed, and the feedback from the builders and suppliers who have already picked it up is the same across the board: this is the kind of...
A detailed comparison of the two biggest cost shocks to hit Australian construction in living memory, and what the lessons of one tell us about surviving the other. The comparison gets made constantly now. Builders mention it on job sites. Industry bodies invoke it in...
The Middle East is on fire. The Strait of Hormuz is choked. Oil is above $120 a barrel. And right now, thousands of Australian builders are about to find out the hard way just how exposed their supply chains really are. We've Been Here Before, But This Time It's...
The Middle East conflict is hitting Australian construction where it hurts. Your job is to keep your client relationships intact. Nobody signed a contract expecting a war in the Middle East to land on their budget. But that is the situation many Australian builders...
A real-world audit of Australia's biggest residential builders revealed response times stretching from 25 minutes to never. The research behind the numbers is even more confronting and the opportunity for builders who act on it is significant. In 2018, a team working...
Across Australia’s construction sector, a familiar frustration continues to surface among builders trying to grow their businesses: content. “I don’t know what to post.”“I’m too busy.”“I’m not interesting enough.” These are not uncommon objections. In fact, they are...
The construction industry in Australia may look a long way from the battle lines in the Middle East, but it is tightly connected to them through fuel, freight, imported inputs, project finance and business confidence. As of March 2026, the conflict has expanded beyond...
In an industry where trust is often hard won and easily lost, builders rarely get a second chance to make a first impression. Long before a potential client calls, emails, or books a meeting, they are already making decisions. They are scrolling. Comparing....
For the past decade, residential builders have been sold a simple idea: more leads equals more growth. More impressions. More clicks. More enquiries. On paper, it sounds logical. In reality, it has quietly become one of the most damaging narratives in the home...
If you relied solely on mainstream media to understand the construction industry, you would think the whole thing was collapsing in slow motion. Every other headline screams crisis.Builder collapses.Projects abandoned.Trades under pressure.Housing is broken.Industry...
How builders can read the balance between demand and supply to stay one step ahead In a housing market where timing and location make or break a project, understanding real demand is everything. Builders who can see where the next wave of buyers is forming have a...
The five platforms helping builders make smarter decisions in 2025 Australia’s building industry is entering a new era of intelligence. Market cycles are tightening, clients are more informed, and the need for builders to plan with precision has never been greater....
“Toxic” is a word we hear a lot in business today especially when talking about teams. But as leadership coach Dan Urquhart reminded us on The Good Builder Podcast, most building businesses don’t start out toxic. They drift there slowly through a string of small,...
By Aaron Ng If you work in construction you know there are a million frameworks out there. Everyone has a secret sauce. Most of it looks good on a PowerPoint slide and gets forgotten as soon as the meeting ends. But every now and then you find something that actually...
Saturday night marked a milestone for one of the Australian building industry’s quiet success stories. Goop Guys, the protective coatings specialists trusted by builders nationwide, celebrated their 25th anniversary with a night to remember at Australia Zoo. Guests...
In today’s construction industry, where margins are tight and every marketing dollar counts, directing potential clients to the right digital destination is critical. Yet many builders and trades still funnel valuable traffic from ads straight to their homepage, a...
This week on The Good Builder Podcast (our Monday edition of The Daily Dose), we tackled one of the biggest misconceptions in the building industry: that technology means expensive systems, complex rollouts, and endless training. The truth? Some of the most effective...
Running a business is often compared to a battle. We talk about “market share wars,” “winning clients,” and “beating the competition.” But Ali Mamujee, founder of The Moat newsletter, offers a different metaphor, one that resonates deeply with builders, trades, and...
I worked in the FMCG retail world long enough to know that sometimes the best marketing does not look like marketing at all. Some of the most powerful campaigns I saw actually told customers not to buy. One of the most famous examples came from Patagonia in 2011. They...
NZ’s Housing Slump. What It Means for Australian Builders House prices in New Zealand have dropped back to pre pandemic levels. Rents are down. Construction has slowed. On paper, it’s the kind of correction affordability advocates dream about. But here in Australia?...
Could rethinking compliance deliver more affordable homes without sacrificing quality? New Zealand thinks so. Here’s why Australian builders should pay attention. What’s Happening in New Zealand? New Zealand is making a bold move to shake up how builders meet energy...
Forget house-and-land packages — how about an entire island? In what can only be described as the most Queensland real estate listing of the year, a 500-hectare slice of paradise off the coast of Mackay is now up for grabs. Yes, you read that right — an island. Not a...
Summary: Builders must own their decisions. But suppliers who incentivise volume at any cost, promoting trades based on how much product they move not the quality they deliver, are making it harder for the industry to lift its standards. It’s time to ask what happens...
There has been a bit of news and a bit of analysis around Airbnbs and the impact they have on the housing market, if any. So we did a little digging. What we found is that the answer depends on where you look, how you measure it, and who you ask. There is no single...
By Aaron Ng, Founder – The Good Builder Summary: Australia has built more new homes per capita than many of its global peers, yet housing has never felt less affordable. This opinion piece explores why the simple supply-and-demand narrative fails to explain the crisis...
The future of Australian building needs a stronger foundation, and a new industry-led initiative has just stepped up to the challenge. A new not-for-profit organisation, the Sustainable Foundations Group (SFG), has officially launched, spearheaded by three industry...
There’s a simple truth in our industry; it’s easy to talk about mental health, but it’s a lot harder to create the spaces where those conversations actually happen. That’s why we started TGB Fridays, and why last Friday night’s very first event on the Sunshine Coast...
The Albanese Government is back—and housing is firmly in the crosshairs. With Labor securing another term following the 2025 Federal Election, their renewed mandate comes with a suite of housing-focused policies that could reshape the building landscape across...
We're big fans of the Level Up Podcast and thought we'd share a few of our insights from a recent podcast from Duayne. In the latest episode of Level Up with Duayne Pearce, Duayne sits down with holistic health coach Hector Del Nido, and it couldn’t have come at a...
We talk a lot about firsts in this country. First homes. First steps onto the property ladder. First chances. But what happens when life doesn’t go to plan? What happens when someone’s first chance gets tangled in someone else’s name, someone else’s control, or...
Builder brokers are popping up everywhere. If you’re a builder, especially a smaller one looking to grow, you’ve probably already crossed paths with one. Maybe you’ve had a great experience, or maybe you’ve been left scratching your head wondering who’s talking to the...
We don’t always want to talk about mental health, especially not on site or around the smoko table. But this one’s worth sticking with. Because sometimes, the biggest strength isn’t pushing through. It’s knowing when to pause. Aaron Morris, Group Sales Manager at...
Over 300 builders, suppliers and other professionals jostled into the Brisbane Convention Centre for HIA’s annual State of the Nation breakfast in Brisbane on Tuesday morning. With the TGB team on site, Peter Loves gives the official Good Builder event recap. Senator...
LATEST NEWS
The Melbourne townhome builder has reached a community milestone by linking a meal donation to every home it builds. Head of Sales and Acquisitions Sam Martinez explains why the model is deliberately uncapped, and what he thinks separates a good builder from the rest....
Most builders started as tradies, not business operators. The business side arrived gradually and nobody handed them a manual. Last updated: June 2026 Running a building business in Australia means doing two jobs at once. The first is the one you trained for:...
Last updated: June 2026 Most builders sit at one of two extremes. Either they do no marketing at all and rely on referrals that arrive in waves, feast then famine, or they spend money chasing leads and end up buried in tyre-kickers who were never going to build....
From 1 July 2026, Western Australia will no longer require a registered builder for non-habitable structures valued under $50,000. The change opens the door for more tradespeople to quote this work, but it also raises questions about quality and accountability. For...