Sunshine Coast modular builder Oly Homes is preparing to move into a new factory at Corbould Park that would lift its output from around 200 homes a year to around 550. The reasons behind the move say a lot about where demand for factory built homes is coming from.

Oly Homes has been delivering modular homes to Australian families for more than 50 years. It now has more customers than its current sites can handle.

The company plans to consolidate its operations from Yandina and Cooroy into a single, larger facility in the Sunshine Coast Industrial Park at Corbould Park, near Caloundra.

The new factory will allow Oly Homes to increase its annual production from 200 to 550 homes and create about 70 new jobs, according to RM Capital, the Mooloolaba based fund manager whose property fund is paying for the facility.

That is close to a threefold lift for a regional manufacturer. It is also one of the clearer signals yet that demand for modular homes in Queensland is moving beyond niche.

Oly Homes says demand is outpacing what it can build

Managing director Dale Funston said in mid 2025 that the number of customers wanting a home from Oly Homes was outpacing what the business could deliver, even with the efficiency of factory production. In his words, it was time to expand.

According to RM Capital, Oly Homes is currently booked out more than six months in advance.

He pointed to the reasons buyers are coming to the factory model. No build days are lost to weather. Every trade is on hand every day, so there is no time lost to scheduling, and multiple homes can be built at once.

RM Capital says that once in the new facility, Oly Homes will be able to build and install a two bedroom, two bathroom house in two months.

For buyers facing long build times and tight trade availability, that speed is the selling point. It is also why a manufacturer with a full order book has run out of room.

The new Corbould Park site is built around a larger yard, not just a larger shed

When the expansion was announced in July 2025, it was described as a new 21,900 square metre factory. That figure is the area of the site.

The fund page for the project describes a 21,900 square metre freehold site at 14 and 34 Maurice Harvey Crescent. On completion, it will have more than 3,200 square metres of industrial floor space, extensive hardstand and storage, and more than 60 car parks.

RM Capital puts the floor space at 3,273 square metres and the hardstand and storage at 13,580 square metres. On those figures, the building covers about 15 per cent of the land and the yard about 62 per cent.

For a business that trucks finished modules out the gate, that balance makes sense. Room to store, stage and load completed homes is part of the production line, and it is where much of the extra capacity sits.

RM Capital says the expanded facility is likely to support a broader mix of housing styles, including medium density formats.

The timeline has moved. The Commonwealth Bank’s July 2025 announcement said Oly Homes expected to complete the factory in the second half of 2026. The fund lists a settlement date of 30 September 2026 and has not published an opening date, so the jump to 550 homes a year is still ahead.

What is volumetric modular construction?

Volumetric modular construction is a method where complete three dimensional sections of a home are built and fitted out in a factory, then transported to the block and placed on footings. Panelised construction, by contrast, makes flat parts such as wall frames in a factory and assembles them on site. Oly Homes builds volumetric modules on steel frames.

Bank finance has opened modular homes to more buyers

Part of what is driving demand is a change in how factory built homes are financed.

Construction loans were designed around work done on the buyer’s land. When most of a home is built in a factory first, buyers have traditionally had to fund much of that stage themselves. The Commonwealth Bank says a customer could previously have had to fund up to 90 per cent of the upfront costs.

Under its current policy, customers using a CommBank Assessed Manufacturer on a fixed price contract up to $1.5 million can access progress payments of up to 80 per cent of the contract price or 150 per cent of land equity, whichever is lower, before the home is fixed to the land. With other manufacturers, the limits are 60 per cent and 120 per cent.

Oly Homes was among the first builders on that assessed list. We looked at how those payments follow the factory rather than the slab when PrefabAUS released its standard prefab contract.

For buyers, that means less money tied up before the house arrives. For a manufacturer, it means a wider pool of customers who can actually get the build funded, and steadier cash flow through the factory stage.

Regional Queensland is where the need for factory built homes is sharpest

Oly Homes delivers homes across regional and remote Queensland, and that is where the case for factory production is strongest.

The Queensland Government has made the same point about its own factory. In May it said it was expanding QBuild’s Portsmith facility in Cairns to lift annual production by 40 per cent from 1 July 2026, citing the private market’s limited capacity to deliver factory built homes in that region. The Cairns facility has completed 30 homes since manufacturing began in 2024.

Building offsite means work can continue through the wet season, with finished modules transported once communities are accessible. RM Capital says the expanded facility will allow Oly Homes to better service new government supply contracts. It has not named those contracts.

An investor backed fund is making the expansion possible

The expansion has come about through a property fund created by Mooloolaba based fund manager RM Capital, the investment arm of Rafter Myers.

RM Capital invited investors to share in ownership of the project. According to RM Capital, the fund was quickly subscribed, mainly by local investors, and raised $8.7 million to help buy the property, develop the site and pay all fees and costs. The remainder of the funding will be borrowed from the Commonwealth Bank, which RM Capital says has a strong interest in helping scale up Australia’s prefab housing industry.

RM Capital says it acquired the 2.19 hectare property for $10.524 million, and puts the new facility at $25.5 million. Having secured a long term lease with Oly Homes, the fund aims to position the asset for sale as a stabilised, income producing industrial investment, and is forecasting a 90 per cent total return for investors over its term.

Oly Homes will become an equity partner in the project and has agreed to a 10 year lease, with two further five year options.

At 550 homes a year, Oly Homes would equal about 2 per cent of Queensland house approvals

Scale needs context. The Queensland Government Statistician’s Office reports a trend estimate of 2,432 private sector houses approved in Queensland in September 2026.

Annualised, that is roughly 29,200 houses a year. At 550 homes, a full capacity Corbould Park would equal about 2 per cent of that figure. That is our calculation, and it sets factory output against approvals, which are not the same measure.

Two per cent will not reset the state’s pipeline on its own. In the regional towns where Oly Homes delivers, a few dozen extra homes can be the difference between a project going ahead and waiting years for local trades.

A bigger factory still needs trades on the block

Around the Sunshine Coast, about 70 new factory jobs will draw on the same pool of carpenters, electricians, plumbers and labourers that site builders rely on.

The site work does not disappear. Footings, connections, services, craneage and finishing still happen on the block, and someone has to be accountable for the join between factory and site.

For regional builders, a larger modular manufacturer may be as much a delivery partner as a competitor, particularly on remote jobs where keeping trades on site for months is the real cost.

The rules are still catching up. The national voluntary certification scheme for prefab manufacturers is still being designed by the ABCB. Consultation on its draft rules closed on 15 September 2026, and commencement is intended by mid 2028.

Demand for modular homes is real, and the new factory has to keep up with it

Oly Homes is not expanding on a forecast. It is expanding because customers are already waiting.

The bigger factory answers today’s demand. Keeping it full for the next decade is the real test.

The bigger factory answers today’s demand. Keeping it full for the next decade is the real test.

A factory sized for 550 homes needs a steady flow of orders from private buyers and government, through good years and slow ones. Finance that follows the factory, and certification that lets one approval travel, will decide how fast that flow grows.

That is worth watching as Corbould Park comes online, because the same test applies to every manufacturer now scaling up to lift Australia’s housing supply.

The Good Builder Take

Oly Homes has been building in factories for more than five decades, and it is only now hitting a capacity wall. That says something has shifted on the buyer side, not just the supply side.

Finance that recognises the factory stage, regional shortages of trades and buyers chasing certainty on build times are all pulling in the same direction. A manufacturer booked out six months ahead and planning to nearly triple output is what that shift looks like in practice.

For more conversations with the builders and manufacturers behind factory built housing, listen to The Good Builder Podcast and follow us for updates as Corbould Park comes online.

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Last updated: 8 November 2026. Approvals data from the Queensland Government Statistician’s Office September 2026 release. Site details as published by RM Capital.

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Author: TGB Editorial