Cooking the Books podcast: Why prefab housing has been ignored until now

Fletcher Building's new Clever Core facility, New Zealand's largest purpose-designed, offsite home manufacturing facility. Photo / Fletcher Building

Each week the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, we consider prefab housing. Hosted by Frances Cook.

All but the most blinkered of politicians and property lobbyists admit we have a housing crisis in this country.

Prices are climbing far faster than wages, and as a result some people worry they'll never be able to buy their own home.

One interesting solution to bring prices back down is to increase prefab housing.

Think of it like this. It's always more expensive to create something bespoke, in place, and bring all the workers to that spot to get it done. That's how most of our housing is done right now.

Whereas prefab is exactly what the name says – it's pre-made, elsewhere, usually in a factory.

The workers get into a groove, get most of the parts done in an efficient factory model, and then ship them to the housing site to be assembled.

So why don't we have lots more of this happening?

Well, there's been some red tape that has made this extremely difficult in New Zealand.

As always though, you just need to know the pathways around it.

For the latest Cooking the Books podcast I talked to Scott Fisher from PreFabNZ, and Rupert Gough from Mortgage Lab.

We discussed what's caused problems for prefab so far, which banks are friendliest to it, and what types of law changes are in the works.

For the interview, watch the video podcast above, or play the audio here.

If you have a question about this podcast, or question you'd like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here, Instagram here and Twitter here.

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