At the recent PrefabNZ conference held in Wellington, we heard from both sides of politics about the best way to tackle the housing affordability crisis in New Zealand, and specifically in Auckland.

National’s Nick Smith has identified supply as the key issue in developing an affordable housing market - freeing up the supply of land so that market forces can provide affordable housing. Labour’s Phil Twyford wants to tackle the supply problem through Kiwi Build – a large-scale, government-backed building scheme that will make use of existing green and brown field land to pump out up to 100,000 affordable houses into Auckland and New Zealand over 10 years.

Both approaches have potential in reducing the supply gridlock and assisting with subsequent decreases in demand and high pricing, but neither will fundamentally succeed without addressing the need for higher productivity in the built environment. In fact, what we desperately need is a radical shift in the way we think about, design, procure and make buildings.

Organisations like PrefabNZ, Pure Advantage and others are consistently espousing the benefits of smarter and faster ways of producing consistently high-quality buildings. The fact is that we currently have all of the tools and systems we need to create innovative and affordable housing. So why isn’t it happening?

Traditionally, the housing market in New Zealand is provided by the conventional one-man, one-van model. This model is superfragile to the boom and bust cycle we have historically faced. The limited ability of small construction businesses to invest in increasing productivity is a critical factor. Where technology has dramatically changed the face of virtually every other industry, the construction industry is still highly linear, fragmented and off-line. Whilst BIM technology has been around in mainstream design practice for around 20 years, it is still underutilised, wrongly implemented and siloed.

Capital can also be a constraint. Getting investment to get the bare essentials for creating an offsite house, being a covered controllable space, a lifting mechanism and some tools can be a big commitment. Presenting an idea for an innovative prefab system to an investor often ends up with the question: ‘I have a bit of land up north, can you design me a bach?’ It often surprises me that in the one of the largest sectors of the market, with the least amount of productivity, that people can’t or don’t want to see the opportunities.

Another big misconception is that scale is necessary for housing affordability and prefabrication. Yes, scale may assist in dropping material prices, but it is not a replacement for productivity. Again, at the PrefabNZ conference, visiting expert Amy Marks asked the audience to take this pledge: I will not use scale as an excuse. I personally adopted that as a mantra long ago and decided to make scale the key design driver for developing prefab projects. But if you go further you discover what Amy also pointed out: scale follows productivity, not the other way round.

But the exciting thing is this: at every point in the construction sector there is the potential to innovate. In design, business models, materials and fabrication, process, procurement, compliance, delivery, financing, construction and energy, there are tools right now to innovate with. Unfortunately this is analogous to having a too-long to-do list, so where do you start?

My belief is that you start with the one-man, one-van businesses and help them move from fragility to flexibility. Collectively, we can provide accessible, sustainable and innovative housing solutions that clients are increasingly demanding, and that can be delivered by cohesive teams not penalised for being small. There is room in the market for large-scale providers of prefabricated housing and products, and for contractors to provide multi-level timber buildings that go up a level a day, but that is only part of the answer. Relying on solutions that require huge amounts of capital investment decreases flexibility and increases fragility.

There is a solution that exists or can be developed for every building and client, provided that we put productivity, curiosity and collaboration first.

And never use scale as an excuse – use it as a driver of innovation.

Hampton Jones Property Consultancy has a new brand identity, and will now be known simply as Hampton Jones to focus on the delivery of a wide breadth of services under one banner, including architecture, building surveying, project delivery and quantity surveying.