When John King talks about JG King Homes, he is not reciting a corporate script. He is describing a life spent inside a family business that has grown from a small steel frame plant in Ballarat to one of Victoria’s most recognised home builders.
“We are one of the few builders that truly covers the entirety of Victoria,” he said on The Good Builder podcast. “From Mildura to Bairnsdale, from Wodonga to Warrnambool and everything in between. There is no part of Victoria we say no to.”
This year, JG King marks 40 years in business. In an industry where many brands struggle to survive a single cycle, four decades is a serious milestone. Behind that longevity sit three consistent themes in the way John and his family operate: long-term thinking, genuine vertical integration, and a quiet obsession with building better homes for ordinary families, not just more of them.
From paint under the fingernails to statewide builder
The JG King story starts in 1985, when John’s father launched the business under the brand New Steel Homes. At the time, John was a 16-year-old working weekends and holidays in the factory.
“I was painting welds, getting the rust-proof paint underneath my fingers and helping out hands-on in the factory,” he recalled.
New Steel Homes was effectively a kit home model. The company engineered and supplied steel frames, plans and brochures so builders or local entrepreneurs could assemble homes themselves.
But the model had a built-in problem most factory operators would recognise.
“The typical consumer just took a very long time to build the home,” John said. “They built it on weekends and it took months and months, sometimes years. You are just feeding them bits and pieces to get the house built.”
Very early in the life of the business, the family made a critical decision: shift from kit homes to being a full build builder. Instead of supplying only the frame and plans, they would deliver complete homes.
From there, the growth map reads like a tour of regional Victoria: Ballarat to Bendigo, Warrnambool to Horsham, then into Echuca, Wodonga, Bairnsdale and eventually Sunshine and metropolitan Melbourne.
“It has been a long journey,” John said. “But that footprint means we are exposed to a whole range of climatic conditions and challenges with energy ratings, councils, and finding trades.”
Learning every part of the business
John has not simply sat in a boardroom while JG King expanded.
Over forty years he has worked his way through almost every function in the company: manufacturing, accounts, marketing, sales, estimating and site supervision.
“I have had hands-on involvement in all the aspects of the business,” he said. “Now I really spend a lot of my time at a strategy level, working on innovation, overseeing our manufacturing businesses and working closely with our CEO to shape how we grow and where we head the product.”
That breadth of experience has given him a practical understanding of how decisions in one part of the business affect everyone else. It also feeds into his view of who the “customer” really is.
“You learn very quickly that the customer is more than just the person who walks in and signs a piece of paper,” he said.
“It is also the subcontractor who gives you feedback on the type of frame you are putting up. It is the windows you are putting in and how they could be better. It is the supervisors and the manufacturing team.
“We find it really important that we get feedback from all different parts of the business. Together we collaborate and we work out how we can provide a better frame, better windows, and a better build.”
That feedback loop is one of the quiet advantages of JG King’s vertical integration: because the business owns key supply lines as well as the building company, it can turn field feedback into product change far faster than a traditional builder-supplier relationship allows.
Family culture and growing people from within
Despite the scale, John still talks about JG King in very simple terms: a family business that takes its responsibilities seriously.
“One thing I have certainly learned from my father is that the people that work for us, you have got to really treat them like family because they rely on you,” he said.
“They are not just coming to work. They have usually got a family behind them. They are looking to you for surety, for longevity, for something they can rely on to plan the rest of their lives.”
That philosophy shows up in how the company approaches recruitment and leadership.
“We see that everybody that works in the business, we have invested time in them and we are hoping they can move on into new roles and progress through the business,” John said.
“When we have a position open, the first place we look is internally. Who can take that next step? Who can grow and take on more responsibility? Who can we invest some more time in?
“That is more important than going out to the market and saying, who can we poach from another builder?”
That approach is not just theory. Recently, two staff members who started with the business when there were “maybe five to seven people” on the books retired after 38 and 39 years of service, having risen to senior roles running a manufacturing business and a construction region.
The culture extends beyond the internal team and out into the towns where JG King operates.
“We have 12 offices around Victoria,” John said. “We have people living in communities everywhere. We make a point of supporting local sports, local charities, so that we are part of the community, not just a builder that comes in, supplies a house and disappears.”
One of the clearest examples is the company’s long-term support for the Fiona Elsey Cancer Research Centre.
“We basically employ one of the scientists there,” John said. “If you are working in any of those research areas, they do not pay scientists enough. That research and that innovation is what drives this country. So we look for ways we can support those areas.”
Pioneering steel frames and helping shape Truecore
If JG King has a single technical signature, it is steel framing.
“We have only ever built out of steel,” John said. “When we first started, the New Steel franchise system was basically building a cyclone proof house. It came out of Queensland where everything has to be cyclone proof.”
Over time, the business realised that level of structure was not necessary for Victoria and worked closely with BlueScope to refine the system into a lighter, more efficient product.
“We did some work with BlueScope and improved the system to a light gauge product that is a lot lighter and just as strong,” he explained.
The partnership went further than simply buying product.
“One of our staff members, who still works with us, was the number two licence holder for the Truecore software,” John said. “Together they collaborated a lot in developing where the Truecore system headed.
“We bought some of the very first roll formers. We have gone through the whole journey and we are probably one of the largest users of that system, with the most people trained in using it.”
The result is a frame system that is highly accurate, fast to install and easier on trades.
“We push the job out from our drafting team into our steel frame plant,” John said. “It is checked, then rolled, and it is within millimetres of where it should be. We have a tolerance of possibly minus three millimetres over about six metres.
“A timber frame weighs three times as much for the same section. The trades people on site love it. They can move it, manoeuvre it, erect it and put the trusses up with two people. They do not need cranes on site.”
Once locked together, John describes the frame as “a bit like a Meccano set: very rigid, very strong, and very lightweight.”
Eight-star homes at no extra cost: windows as the game changer
If steel frames were the first major technical shift, high-performance windows are the latest.
The trigger came when NCC 2022 and the move to seven star homes were being tabled. As a window manufacturer as well as a builder, JG King could see the limits of traditional aluminium systems.
“Seven star is not easy to get to with the current technology in windows,” John said. “Aluminium systems are only really designed to do the bare minimum in double glazing. You can fit an 18 millimetre pane into the system, but you cannot get much bigger than that. And you cannot call some of these aluminium systems high performance.”
The company realised it needed to change technology.
“We decided we were going to make UPVC windows,” John said. “We selected a company out of Italy. It is a system that makes seamless joins and lets us make truly high-performance windows.”
The results, he admits, exceeded expectations.
“We were making windows that were achieving some of the best U-values you could get in volume windows on the market,” he said.
“We were putting in a 24 millimetre double glazed pane with low E on it and going, hang on a minute, we are getting well over seven star. So we started to wind back the insulation because we suddenly realised how important having a good window in a house was.”
From there, the leap to offering eight star homes at no extra cost to the customer became surprisingly achievable.
“We thought, why do we not just offer an eight star home?” John said. “It just was not a big effort.”
On smaller homes, the window upgrade alone did much of the heavy lifting. On larger designs, the company lifted wall and ceiling insulation and added insulation to some utility areas.
“In areas like Mildura we get closer to nine, nine and a half stars,” John said. “You are handing over a product that is really close to passive.”
Crucially, the benefits are not just on paper. The shift has changed the way their homes feel.
“You are getting a really comfortable home because we are putting in high-performance windows,” John said. “You are getting more windows in the house than we used to put in, larger windows.
“You walk into the house and the consultant is trained to turn the lights off. The house is still bright and airy. Then they turn the lights back on and it improves it. The houses are really comfortable and bright and they are fantastic to live in.”
Vertical integration and resilience under pressure
JG King’s vertical integration, with in-house steel and window manufacturing, is not just an efficiency play. It is a major risk reducer.
“When we went through COVID, it was a really great example,” John said. “A lot of builders just could not get things like frames and windows. Supply chains broke and builders came to a grinding halt. We never skipped a beat.”
Because the business controls its own capacity, it was able to keep pushing homes to lock-up, even as global shortages hit everyone else.
Beyond supply, the integrated model allows for tighter data loops and less waste.
“We can get our CAD packages talking to our EnduroCAD and our window packages so we can get really accurate results all the way through,” John said. “The wastage is minimal and the quality of what is going out is accurate. Those things are really hard to quantify for businesses that do not have that vertical integration.”
Using AI as an enabler, not a threat
For a builder that started in 1985, JG King is not shy about modern tools.
“There is a fear in the world that AI is going to take over and get rid of jobs,” John said. “We see AI as an enabler and a way to do things better, to learn things better, to check for errors and improve what people do.”
Teams inside the business already use AI to simplify legislation, create safety content and support internal communication.
“You get a piece of legislation from the government and it is dense,” John said. “You dive into AI and say, create a summary that I can understand, or write an occupational health and safety infographic. These are things people probably had to outsource in the past.”
For John, this ties back to one of the industry’s biggest challenges.
“As a business we need to look at how we improve productivity,” he said. “The building industry has not improved its productivity in 50 years. That is our next challenge. How do we continue to do more with the same amount of people?”
What makes a good builder?
After 40 years, John has a simple answer to the question that sits at the heart of The Good Builder.
“A good builder is a builder that listens to all the customers, the players in the industry we are in,” he said.
“You have got to build a smart home. You have got to build a home that is really nice to live in, that is going to be future proof, that is going to be robust. You cannot build a house that is only built for the short term with poor materials and poor practices.
“It has got to be a house that is going to last. That is why we offer a 50 year warranty. We build with a steel frame. We build with the best windows you can put into a house in the industry. We make sure the house is going to last and people are going to be proud of it in 10, 20, 30 years.”
For Victorian families, and for builders looking for a blueprint on how to pair scale with integrity, that might be the most important lesson of all.
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