Sekisui, ADMARES, Modscape and Built Living are all adding factory capacity. The shift that matters is in how homes are bought, designed and scheduled, and in the industrial land those factories need before they can make anything.

Since May, some of the biggest names circling Australian housing have been placing bets on the same thing. Factory capacity.

Sekisui Chemical, the Japanese manufacturer behind Sekisui Heim, resolved on 10 September to buy 51 per cent of Brisbane builder and developer Ausbuild for AU$335 million. It has stated an intention to bring modular construction into Ausbuild’s terrace and townhouse business within about three years.

Finnish housing manufacturer ADMARES has set up an Australian subsidiary in Brisbane and says its first Smart Factory here is expected to be located in Queensland. Modscape + Modbotics broke ground in August on a purpose built plant at Stapylton, between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. In Western Australia, Wesfarmers and Built Group have formed Built Living to establish a precast apartment manufacturing facility north of Perth.

We have covered prefab and modern construction methods many times. This is not another story about whether modular works. It is about what happens to a building business when more of the house is made somewhere else, and about a constraint that gets far less attention. Every one of these factories needs a very large piece of land.

Factory capacity is being treated as housing supply

The logic behind these investments is simple. A factory can only bring homes forward if its production slots are filled well ahead of time.

That is why the most telling detail in the Western Australian deal is not the dollar figure. The WA Government is providing incentive payments of around $20 million each to Built Living and Atlas Precast, and says it will reserve capacity in both facilities for housing and essential infrastructure projects. Built Living is expected to support more than 2,000 apartments a year once complete, according to Wesfarmers.

Reserving output in advance is what turns a factory into supply. Without a forward order book, a plant runs below capacity and never pays down its fixed cost, a pattern we looked at when Canada tried to order its way to a modular industry.

ADMARES describes itself as a contract manufacturer serving developers and builders. That wording matters. What is being sold is production capacity, not a finished build.

Procurement moves from a tender to an order book

On a traditional job, procurement unfolds as the build goes. Trades are booked stage by stage. Materials are ordered as the program gets close.

Industrialised construction reverses that. The biggest commitment, a slot on a production line, is made first. Pricing is set by volume and repetition rather than quoted fresh for each job.

Money moves earlier too. Production happens before the home is on its land, which is why finance is being reworked. Tasmania released a draft Modular Housing Finance Guarantee Bill this year, setting up a framework under which the State may guarantee certain loans for the purchase and installation of modular homes. The operational detail is still to come through regulations.

Design and specification are locked in months earlier

In a factory, a late change is not a phone call to the site supervisor. It is a change to a production file, a materials order and a line schedule.

So the design freeze moves forward. Selections, services layouts and structural details are settled before manufacture starts, not while the frame is going up.

This is where standardisation stops being a buzzword. Repeat designs, fixed dimensions and a limited range of specified products are what let a factory run at pace. Sekisui’s stated focus on terraces and townhouses fits that pattern. Those are product types that repeat.

The variation conversation changes shape as a result. Flexibility is front loaded into the design stage, and what is left after that point is narrower.

The program runs on two tracks at once

Site works and manufacturing can run in parallel. Slab, services and civil work happen on the land while the home is being made on the line.

That compresses the on site program. It also moves the critical path. The pressure points become the factory slot, transport and the crane day, rather than trade availability from week to week.

A delayed slab no longer just holds up the next trade. It can leave finished modules with nowhere to go.

Reserving output in advance is what turns a factory into supply.

Labour and quality control change location

The work does not disappear. It moves indoors and changes shape.

ADMARES says each Smart Factory would employ around 3,000 assembly line workers across three shifts, supported by 220 office based staff. The WA Government expects Built Living’s facility to support around 150 ongoing operational jobs.

That is shift work in a controlled environment, not a crew moving between sites. On site, the remaining work concentrates around foundations, connections, finishing and commissioning.

Quality control moves with it. Checks happen at stations on a production line, repeated the same way every time. The regulatory system is still catching up. The Australian Building Codes Board closed consultation on 15 September on a proposed National Voluntary Certification Scheme for Manufacturers of Prefabricated Construction, designed to give manufacturers a nationally consistent certification pathway.

Supply chains and builder relationships are being redrawn

A factory buys the same inputs in the same quantities, again and again. That favours long supply agreements over job by job purchasing.

Wesfarmers has said Built Living is expected to create growth opportunities for its existing businesses, including supply arrangements with Bunnings’ trade business on arm’s length, commercially competitive terms.

The builder’s role is being redefined as well. In some models the builder is the manufacturer’s customer. In others, the builder is the installer and site manager. Sekisui’s move puts land, home building and a stated manufacturing plan under one ownership. Panel makers such as 5North in Adelaide sit at the other end, supplying components that builders assemble themselves.

Which of those relationships a business sits in shapes its margin, its risk and its control over the program.

Every one of these factories needs a lot of land

This is the part of the shift that rarely makes the renders.

Modscape + Modbotics’ new Queensland plant is a 20,918 square metre built to suit facility at Frasers Property Industrial’s 65 hectare Vantage Yatala estate in Stapylton, on a 15 year lease. Frasers says it will have heavy duty load bearing floors engineered for specialised machinery and robotics, plus increased internal clearances. After the deal, the estate was 85 per cent leased.

ADMARES works at a different order of scale. Its consulting partner MHP describes the first Smart Factory design as a production facility of about 310,000 square metres. That is 31 hectares of production space, before parking, storage, loading and laydown are counted.

Built Living’s site came from government. The WA Government is providing a five year rent free lease period for the facility at Meridian Park in Neerabup, along with support for utility connections.

Put those together and a pattern emerges. Housing factories need large, flat, serviced sites with heavy floor capacity, high clearances, strong power supply, zoning that allows around the clock operation and direct access to major roads for oversize loads. They also need to sit within reach of both a workforce and the building sites they serve.

That puts them in direct competition with logistics and warehousing for the same land. CBRE’s industrial and logistics research put national vacancy at 3.2 per cent in the first half of 2026, below the 4 per cent it treats as long term equilibrium, with Brisbane at 3.0 per cent and Perth at 1.0 per cent. On the Sunshine Coast, Economic Development Queensland describes the current stage of its Sunshine Coast Industrial Park as the final opportunity to secure prime industrial land in the estate.

The ownership model is shifting too. Long built to suit leases let manufacturers put capital into equipment rather than land, with an industrial developer carrying the site. In WA, government land and rent relief are being used as industrial policy.

Factory location matters to builders for a practical reason. Moving volumetric modules is costly and limited by road access, so where a plant sits sets the catchment it can realistically serve. The industrial land secured now will shape which regions have access to factory capacity over the next decade.

Industrialised construction versus prefabrication

Prefabrication describes making building parts off site, from wall frames and trusses to complete room modules. Industrialised construction describes the business model around it: standardised designs, production lines, forward order books and supply agreements that let a factory run continuously. A builder can use prefabricated components without changing how it procures, designs or schedules work. Industrialised construction changes all three.

The truck is the last step, not the first

It is easy to picture industrialised construction as a module on a truck. That is the visible part.

The real change sits upstream. Orders are placed earlier. Designs are frozen sooner. Programs run on two tracks. Labour moves into shifts. Supply chains firm up into contracts. Behind all of it sits a factory that needed tens of thousands of square metres of scarce industrial land before it could make a single wall.

For anyone running a building business in Australia, the useful question is less whether factories are coming and more where their capacity is being built, and on what terms it is being sold.

The Good Builder Take

The factory announcements get the headlines, but the land deals may be the better signal. A manufacturer that has signed a 15 year lease or accepted a government site has committed to a location, and with it a catchment. Those commitments show where factory capacity will actually be available to builders far more reliably than a render does. Industrial land releases may prove as telling as housing approvals.

We talk construction methods with builders and manufacturers regularly on The Good Builder Podcast. If your business is working with a factory partner, we would like to hear how it is changing the way you run jobs.

Frequently asked questions

Related articles

• The Prefab Certification Scheme Has Moved From Idea to Draft Rules
• Australian Modular Builders Are Eyeing Vietnam, and the Supply Chain Question Is Bigger Than One Factory

Last updated: 30 September 2026

General information only. This article reports on company announcements, government statements and published industry research current as at 30 September 2026. It does not constitute financial, legal, property or investment advice.

Author: TGB Editorial