Yahoo Finance Incredible video reveals 'solution to Australia's housing crisis': 'Just 11 days'
This Queensland building site was able to go up seven storeys in just 11 days.
An incredible timelapse video has illustrated how fast a building block can be erected in Australia thanks to new technology. PT Blink has been hailed as the "IKEA of construction" and CEO Wayne Larsen believes it could be an amazing solution to the housing and construction crisis plaguing the country.
The video shows a new technique that allowed a seven-storey building to take shape in just 11 days. Larsen told Yahoo Finance exactly how they managed the building feat - which otherwise take up to 14 weeks.
The building structures are manufactured offsite and then transported to the site in flat-pack form.
Larsen said this saves months of construction time, minimises waste and reduces overall costs.
This is at a time when Australians struggling to afford houses or even get affordable rentals are crying out for more housing supply, with serious doubt cast over the government's ability to deliver 1.2 million promised new homes in the next decade.
Larsen has argued taking highly complex construction off-site and into factories could go a long way to helping the government meet its target.
"That 1.2 million homes equates to about 240,000 new homes per year. At current rates, we're producing somewhere between 160,000 and 170,000," he said.
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"Construction is full, we just don't have any more capacity.
"So from our perspective, if we take the high-risk, high-complexity processes offsite, make them in a factory, and produce those as finished assembly within a factory, we're doing two things.
He said the move would take the pressure off the conventional construction industry and create local manufacturing jobs close to projects.
In addition to the overall structure, all other building parts like walls, windows, bathrooms, kitchens, and elevators, are designed and manufactured before the structure has been erected.
Once it's in place, the rest of the parts are delivered to the site in finished form and are ready to install.
While flat-pack homes have been around for a few years, multi-level flat-pack buildings of this scale are much further behind.
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Builder backs 'fast builds' after time and cost blowouts
Builder Kevin Vedelago used the PT Blink system on a Brisbane block after his previous project ran five months longer than anticipated.
He told Yahoo Finance he needed something fast, reliable and wouldn't result in a cost blowout.
"It worked for us, and it was a good experience. If I was ever going to build a high-rise apartment again, I would use it," he said.
When a conventional apartment block is built, you put the walls up first, then put the formwork in, then the steel, and then the concrete. Vedelago said you'd repeat that cycle for each floor.
He said this process takes about two weeks to complete, but the concrete usually requires close to four weeks to cure.
"Once you've poured that slab, you can't work underneath that floor for another 28 days," he said.
"So there's a four-week delay in being able to bring in the next lot of trades."
The builder said it would take around 14 weeks to complete the foundations on seven storeys.
How does new process compare to old-style build?
The main structural element used by PT Blink is steel. Traditional builds use concrete which takes much longer.
"We put all the steel work up in 11 days...we were able to do the walls in about two days, and the concrete in one day. So, we were almost turning around a completed floor a week," Vedelago revealed.
"With a Blink system, you can start that floor below the slab you've just poured the next day [instead of 28 days later]."
PT Blink claimed it can complete projects 40 to 60 per cent faster than standard construction timelines.
"We built the whole thing in eight and a bit months. No one else has ever been able to build a building that size, that fast, ever," Vedelago told Yahoo Finance.
For comparison, he said a project of similar size previously took them 19 months to complete.
Saves time, cost and wastage
Larsen said up to 20 per cent of raw building materials needed for construction end up in the bin on traditional construction sites.
But, because everything needed for a PT Blink build is manufactured offsite and to spec, that wastage is massively reduced.
He also estimates that 10 to 15 per cent of labour costs on conventional builds are for "rectification and rework", which aren't needed on his flat-pack system.
Vedelago added that building sites save a lot of money by not having to store all the raw materials during construction because PT Blink handles everything until it's ready to go in the ground.
The PT Blink system has already been used for five builds in Australia and they have been a mix of residential, commercial and civil infrastructure like car parks.
Is this the fix for Australia's housing crisis?
Larsen said their technology is only going to get more efficient, meaning they could soon build faster and larger.
But Vedelago told Yahoo Finance that there's one glaring issue that needs to be fixed before a system like PT Blink can be rolled out en masse across the country.
"Most of these projects take as long to get out of the planning and approval stage as it does to build them," he said.
"If we are really serious about building buildings, quicker approvals are where it needs to happen."
Veteran builder Scott Challen has previously explained to Yahoo Finance how red tape during this stage is killing the construction industry.
“This is the biggest, biggest, biggest anchor that's hanging off the industry at the moment,” he said. “We literally cannot get anything approved.
“I've had a building company for 15 years and we've never had so much work stuck in building approval before ever. And what's happened is we've created so much regulation and legislation around getting anything approved through our local councils that the industry is pretty much gridlocked."
Research released last year found 1.3 million homes could have been built in Australia in the past 20 years if it wasn’t for expensive and extensive zoning, planning and building red tape from councils across the country.
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