The Avid Property Group executive returns to The Good Builder Podcast to talk rising costs, the land crisis, succession, and the quiet discipline that separates the best builders from everyone else.
There are guests you have on the podcast because they are interesting. And there are guests you bring back because the industry asks you to.
Peter Wood, Executive General Manager of Villa World Homes by Avid Property Group, is the second kind.
When Wood first appeared on The Good Builder Podcast, the episode became the most listened-to in the show’s history, across more than 260 episodes. The response from builders was not about the size of his business or the number of homes he had delivered. It was about the way he talks. Measured. Direct. Grounded in reality. No ego on the table.
He is back. And not much has gotten easier since the last time.
The Cost Problem No One Is Fully Across Yet
Before the current conflict in the Middle East escalated, Wood says supply chain pressure was already building quietly. He was watching it from late 2025, describing early signs that product availability was tightening in ways that echoed the pandemic period.
Now it has moved from background noise to front-of-house problem.
Every supplier, every consultant, everyone involved in the industry is looking to reclaim some of their costs with respect to fuel and material costs. How you cover that is very difficult because in some cases surcharges are being levied, in others it is a levy itself, and in others it is just a straight increase to price.
Wood estimates the impact on Avid’s cost of build sits somewhere between two and a half and four and a half per cent above standard. He is quick to caveat that it is a moving number. But the figure itself is almost secondary to the operational problem it creates.
Avid currently has 180 homes on the ground. A typical program on one of their sites involves around 192 tasks, with purchase orders attached to approximately 105 of them. Every surcharge or levy now requires Wood’s team to go back and adjust each one individually.
The real cost of the material increase is one thing. But there is an administrative burden that you have to bear as well.
It is the kind of detail most people outside a construction business would never think to name. Wood names it immediately.
For builders carrying fixed price contracts, the situation is more acute. Wood describes speaking to a builder operating in Hervey Bay and Bundaberg who has 100 homes on the ground, each tracking around twenty to thirty thousand dollars above the contract price. That is not a paperwork problem. That is an existential one.
The Land Crisis, In Plain Terms
Australia’s housing shortfall is described in many ways, depending on who is doing the describing. Wood’s version is the most direct.
In the middle of a housing crisis, I would suggest it is more of a land crisis.
Running a fleet of generators on site because power infrastructure has not arrived. Ordering ice makers so workers can safely drink water. Preparing to close homes and wait for utilities to catch up before they can be handed over to buyers.
These are not hypotheticals. They are active realities on Avid sites right now.
Wood does not dress it up. He has seen this before, and he knows it is not improving. Supply of shovel-ready land is not keeping pace with demand. Utility providers are not in sync with local government timelines. The infrastructure bill lands on councils early; the homes that help pay for it arrive years later, if at all.
HIA data, referenced during the conversation, already shows Australia running approximately 65,000 homes behind the national housing accord target, with years still to run in the cycle. Wood does not see a credible path to closing that gap without a fundamental change in how land is released and serviced.
The Younger Workforce Doing Better Than Expected
Not everything Wood discusses is pressure and constraint.
Avid’s return to Hervey Bay, after years away, forced a reset. Old relationships had moved on. The builder had to establish itself from scratch in a regional market that had grown considerably. What they found was a younger site management and trades cohort than they would typically work with.
The results surprised even Wood.
I was walking around the site and I was just impressed by the presentation of the site, by the quality of the work, by the feedback we were getting, not just from independent third-party QA companies, but by the potential clients themselves.
His explanation for why younger workers were performing at this level is layered. Partly it is the regional mindset. Partly it is working within a structured, system-driven business that removes ambiguity and lets people settle into a clear rhythm. Partly it is simple: you make more money when you know exactly what is expected.
It led Wood to articulate something that tends to get lost in industry conversations about workforce pipeline. The quality of the environment shapes the quality of the outcome. Put a young worker into a disorganised business led by someone with no emotional intelligence, and you are wasting both of them.
What 18 Measurement Points Tells a Supplier
Avid measures its trade and supplier base against 18 performance criteria.
This is not unusual in large building businesses. What is less common is how Wood uses the data.
The score is not a trap. It is a conversation starter. When a supplier is falling short on three or four criteria out of eighteen, the meeting is not about consequences. It is about identifying exactly which items need attention and giving the supplier the opportunity to fix them.
Good suppliers want to hear this feedback. They want to know how they are going. If they are going great, they would like to be recognised. If they are not going so great, they want an opportunity to fix it.
That approach, steady and deliberate rather than reactive, is characteristic of how Wood runs the whole procurement relationship. He says he spends somewhere between twenty and thirty per cent of any given working week managing and building supplier and trade relationships.
Not because it feels good. Because it is what keeps him first in the queue.
The Question He Asks Himself Every Friday Morning
Toward the end of the conversation, Wood shares something that shifts the tone of the whole discussion.
Every Friday morning, at eight o’clock, he sends himself a reminder. The question is the same every week.
Are we building trust with each other?
He unpacks it through five lenses: integrity, objectivity, professional competence, confidentiality, and agility. Not as a performance framework. As a personal audit.
It is a small ritual, but it says something about why Wood operates the way he does. The consistency in how he talks about relationships, measurement, workforce, and integrity is not coincidence. It is the product of someone who has been deliberate about how they show up for a very long time.
If I couldn’t bring that element of relationship management to our procurement, and I was going to have to challenge or compromise my integrity to get something done, well, the next day is the first day of my retirement. Because I just could not live with myself.
Fifty years in the industry. That is the sentence he ends on.
What This Means for Builders
Wood is not a builder in the volume sense that most sole operators or small firms would recognise. But the principles he talks about apply at any scale.
The cost escalations hitting the market right now are real and ongoing. Builders with fixed-price exposure need to understand their surcharge and levy exposure across every live purchase order, not just as a total number but as an administrative task requiring immediate attention.
The land supply problem is structural. It is not a policy announcement away from resolution. Builders working in growth corridors need to build assumptions about infrastructure delays directly into their programs and client communications.
And the workforce and supplier relationship points are perhaps the most transferable. The builders who come out of a difficult period in better shape than they entered it are, almost without exception, the ones who held their relationships together when the pressure was highest. That work happens every week, quietly, before the crisis arrives.
Wood has been doing it that way for fifty years. The podcast numbers suggest the industry is paying attention.
Listen to the full conversation with Peter Wood on The Good Builder Podcast, available on Spotify and all major platforms.
More land news: Who Controls the Land in Your State Might Surprise You. The Data Behind Australia’s Land Pipeline Is More Interesting Than You Think
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