The Good Builder’s Top 100 report found one franchise network added builds in a year the market lost them. On the podcast this week, James Stroud gives an explanation that has almost nothing to do with the market.

Queensland’s hundred largest residential builders wrote fewer homes last financial year and took more money to the bank. Contracted builds across the panel fell from 16,395 to 15,433. Total contract value rose 4.9% to $8.33 billion. The average contract climbed 11.5% to $539,791.

That is not a busier market. It is a dearer one.

Inside that panel, one franchise network did something different. It added builds.

What the report found

The Good Builder’s inaugural Top 100 Queensland Builders report, produced with data partner Australian Construction Data, ranks the state’s hundred largest residential building businesses across two financial years, with franchise networks grouped as single operators. Counting every licence, Stroud Homes wrote 372 contracts for $210.6 million in Queensland, enough for tenth place overall. It was also the only major network to grow its build count in a market that shrank.

The contrast with the rest of the field is the point. G.J. Gardner runs the larger network and held its revenue almost flat on 17% fewer builds, carrying the highest average contract of any volume operation in the ranking. That is a legitimate and probably sensible response to a thinning market. It is also a different thing from growing.

One network grew. The others held their dollars by moving upmarket, which is the move the whole market made.

It is worth being precise about what the cheap end did, because it explains why almost everyone else went the way they did.

Measure	Top 100 panel, FY2025/26	Direction
Contracted builds	16,395 down to 15,433	Down
Total contract value	$8.33 billion	Up 4.9%
Average contract	$539,791	Up 11.5%
Contracts under $400,000	From roughly 1 in 4 builds to about 1 in 8	Down by more than half
Contracts $750,000 and above	Fastest growing tier	Up 45%
Stroud Homes, QLD licences	372 contracts, $210.6 million, tenth overall	Build count up

Contracts under $400,000 fell by more than half. Everything under $500,000 shrank. The $750,000 and above tier jumped 45%. And this was not builders passing on cost: input materials to house construction rose about 2.5% over the same window, and the broadest measure of construction output, materials plus labour, rose around 4%. The average contract rose far further than either. Roughly two thirds of the increase is mix and pricing.

In other words, the industry did not add a premium to every quote. It changed what it was selling. The entry level buyer largely stopped appearing, and the panel followed the money upward.

Stroud was in the same market, facing the same thinning at the bottom. The report separates the genuine movers from the repricers and the builders who moved hardest in both directions. Stroud sits in the small group that added volume rather than value per job.

The full ranking, with both years of builds and value, the networks broken out and the complete methodology, sits in the full Top 100 Queensland Builders report.

So we asked him why

The obvious question for the one operator moving against the panel is what he did differently. James Stroud’s first answer was to decline the premise.

“I don’t really know. I’ve got some suspicions.”

That is a more useful answer than it looks. A builder who claims certainty about why a year went well is usually reverse engineering a story. What followed was a set of explanations that were, almost without exception, about the inside of the business rather than the state of the market.

“Write your own news every morning”

The first suspicion was about attention, and it is the closest thing to a strategy he offered.

“It’s really important to write your own news every morning. So whatever is happening to the industry, well, that’s not going to be Stroud Homes’ story. If the building industry is going down, well, good, you guys do what you want. We’re going to focus on our customer.”

Sitting that beside the report is instructive. The market conditions everyone else was reading were real. The cheap end genuinely thinned. Reading those conditions and moving upmarket was a rational response. Stroud’s network read the same conditions and did not treat them as instructions.

He is careful not to turn this into a slogan about ignoring the market. His point is narrower: the industry’s difficulties are absorbing, and attention spent on them is attention not spent on the client in front of you.

“I just wonder sometimes if maybe builders make a mistake of getting too invested in the difficulties of the industry.”

The man who started the business in 2011 has run it through enough cycles to have earned the view.

The wheelbarrow theory

His second suspicion is about what buyers are actually doing, and it lines up unusually well with the mix shift the report found.

“When people look at something and go, hey, it costs way more than I want it to, I want to make sure that it’s really good. Suddenly I go down to the shop and wheelbarrows cost about three times what I think they should. If I’m gonna do that, I’m gonna get the best wheelbarrow I can find.”

If he is right, the premiumisation in the data is not only builders chasing better jobs. It is also buyers responding to price by raising their standards. Someone spending far more than they expected to spend gets less tolerant of risk, not more.

That matches what we are seeing across the industry. Buyers are not aspirational at the moment. They are de-risking. The old pattern of putting up something cheap and building properly later has largely gone, because the cheap option no longer exists at a price that makes the trade worthwhile. This is the forever house, and clients are behaving accordingly.

You can watch it happen on Reddit, where prospective clients post their floor plans, their fixture selections and, increasingly, their entire building contract, asking strangers to interpret it. James had the sharpest read on why.

“The market has so much information right now that it’s not about us giving them more information. It’s about helping them make sense of it.”

That is the job now. Not disclosure. Translation. If the builder will not make sense of the contract for the client, the client will find someone who has never met you to do it instead.

The defect maths

Where the conversation gets concrete is on defects, and this is the part most likely to be useful to anyone not running a franchise.

Stroud brings an independent inspector through before handover, fixes what is found, lets the client walk through, fixes what they find, and only then hands over.

“We’re not giving you the home until we’ve had a chance to fix all these defects, because we know it’s gonna make you sad today, but happy later.”

The alternative, which he describes seeing across the industry, is the slow bleed.

“It’s a crying shame how you can spend twelve months working with a client, build a beautiful home for them, and then destroy it just going back to fix defects.”

The common fix is to hire a handyman to clear the backlog. James argues that this makes the problem permanent.

“That just takes the onus off the supervisors to manage quality really good during the build. So then you just have a problem where the supervisors get less and less focused on finishing the work at each stage at a good level of quality. Because someone else will pick up the crumbs down the track.”

The logic is about who feels the pain. Move it away from the supervisor and you remove the only reliable pressure to prevent the defect. This is not a franchise insight. It applies to anyone running a building business in Australia at any volume.

He offers a diagnostic that takes about ten seconds. Where is your business busiest? If the honest answer is maintenance, the problem is not maintenance.

Underneath it sits a habit he has borrowed from aviation. He is a pilot, and the comparison is direct.

“Pilots by law must use checklists. It’s not an option. Because if pilots don’t use checklists, people die. And in building, if people don’t use checklists, we just gotta go back later and fix it.”

His view of job management software follows from that, and it is deflating in a useful way.

“What a lot of people don’t realise is there’s some beautiful workflow management software out there, which is really just an on-computer version of a checklist. That’s all it is.”

Not the platform. The habit underneath it. Relying on memory to manage quality, he says, is what takes building companies out.

The unglamorous engine

All of this sits on a commitment he made to himself years ago, borrowed from Toyota’s continuous improvement method. When something goes wrong, put something in place so it cannot recur. No matter how small.

His own example is the office running out of pencils and losing an afternoon. He knows how it sounds.

“I mean that’s a pretty lame example.”

It is not, and that is the whole argument. The threshold is the thing. If pencils get a system, everything above pencils gets one. If pencils do not, you have quietly agreed that some problems are beneath fixing, and that line moves every year.

The objection he hears most is that a given fix will not work for every client. He has a clean answer.

“Well, if it’ll work with twenty per cent of clients, is it worth doing?”

And the improvements themselves come from the clients, including the ones being unfair about it.

“Ninety-five per cent of what they say might be mean spirited. It might be unfair. But it’s like panning for gold. You gotta get that one little fleck of gold out of that.”

The instinct is to discard the whole complaint because of how it was delivered, which discards the useful five per cent with it.

What a network can and cannot do

None of the above requires a franchise. It is worth saying plainly, because a growth result at a network invites the conclusion that the model did it. How franchising works in home building is a question of infrastructure: plans, software, buying power, marketing, and access to operators who have already solved your problem.

What a network cannot do is make anyone use it. James is blunt that the relationship only works when the franchisee wants it.

“I have had people join Stroud that don’t understand that. It doesn’t work. They always get very poor results.”

He describes ringing a franchisee because the numbers showed leads and conversions drifting, months before the trades would have felt it.

“I can see that the number of leads, the number of sales that are coming through, and the number of conversions that are being made are setting this builder up to not have enough work for his trades six months and twelve months from now. So now’s the time to fix it.”

That is early intervention against a leading indicator, and it is available to any builder who watches their own pipeline honestly. The network makes it more likely, not possible.

The caveat he insisted on

He would not take the congratulations cleanly.

“It’s nice to achieve things, it’s nice to win awards and get certain rankings. But if you go and talk to a customer who’s had an experience in the business, they’ll soon bring you back down to ground.”

And on what the ranking is actually worth:

“The final judge will be the people who have built with us and then send their children to build with us or their friends to build with us. They’re the ones that I’m really worried about.”

A single year is a single year. The report itself flags the open question of whether premiumisation holds or the entry level segment returns as approvals convert to completions. Edition two will tell us more than this one can.

But the panel moved one way and one operator moved the other, and the reasons he gives for it are cheaper to copy than they are to dismiss.

THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE

One network grew its build count last year. Everyone else got to the same revenue by selling dearer homes to fewer people. Both are legitimate responses to a thinning market and only one of them is a growth story.

What is striking about James Stroud’s explanation is how little of it is about the market. No pivot. No repricing strategy. He talks about defects, checklists and reading complaints properly. The kind of thing that sounds like housekeeping until you notice who is still adding builds.

The caution is worth keeping. One year is one year, and a single result does not prove a method. But when the panel moves one way and one operator moves the other, the reasons he gives are worth more than the ranking he earned.

Frequently asked questions

James Stroud joins Aaron on The Good Builder Podcast this week. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The Top 100 Queensland Builders report ranks all one hundred businesses in full: qldtop100.thegoodbuilder.com.au

Figures in this article are drawn from The Good Builder’s Top 100 Queensland Builders report, published 3 July 2026, produced with data partner Australian Construction Data. Last updated 16 July 2026.

This article is intended for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice. Laws, regulations, and industry requirements vary by state and territory and change over time. Builders and trades professionals should seek independent advice relevant to their specific circumstances before making business, legal, or financial decisions.

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