‘Minister Phil Twyford has met Fletcher Building's residential and land development chief executive Steve Evans, representatives of Mike Greer Homes and Mark Todd of Ockam Residential who he said were "absolutely bursting to be part of this work. Fletchers are keen to do more housing. They've done a lot of work on panelisation."
"We're going to do large-scale urban renewal projects around rail corridors at Avondale, New Lynn and Panmure, around town centres, taking advantage of the rail and roading network.
"We're going to be as ambitious as possible. There is a $2b cash injection for KiwiBuild over 10 years and we will recycle that money over and over," he said of the state buying the properties, then on-selling to first-home buyers.
"It's not going to happen in the first week. We've always said we'll step it up over three years to hit the 10,000-a-year target. There's a bunch of projects already under way and we'll make sure there's more affordable places there, at Northcote, Mt Roskill and Hobsonville Point."
"We're going to legislate the new urban development agency and that will have various powers and it will hold all the Government's urban land holdings and that will give it a massive balance sheet. It will have a mandate to develop projects specifically like the [former] Hobsonville Land Company."
Half KiwiBuilds will be in Auckland "and the rest will be in places where the housing crisis is most acute. Queenstown which is really in need for urgent intervention. Queenstown is a special case, which needs a particular kind of approach and the Queenstown Lakes District Council has done some great work but it needs the Government to give it a hand. Regions like the Waikato and Bay of Plenty and in Hamilton and Tauranga are under real pressure.
"There will be other areas. We have not done precise modelling in each individual place in New Zealand but the focus will be on Auckland in the short term because that's where the shortage is most acute."
"Part of the concept of KiwiBuild is that work will be tendered to companies that can scale up and build thousands of homes a year, instead of dozens. Fletcher and Mike Greer are the two most obvious. We've had extensive conservations with GJs [Gardner] and lots of others too. So we're wanting to tender work to companies that can drive down the build cost due to economies of scale, off-site manufacturing and panellised construction."
Twyford praised PrefabNZ's chief executive Pamela Bell as "a star, an absolute hero" who he said had led extensive progress in this sector "and that area is brimming with people who have great talent".
KiwiBuild quality would be kept high because "you just have to set standards. The learnings from off-site manufacturing around the world is that you can deliver far better quality," he said, citing Mike Greer's $14m Concision joint venture factory with Spanbuild, using computer technology at Rolleston south of Christchurch, where German components were making panellised home components.
"We need half a dozen other firms that can scale up and then we get a much more competitive building industry. We're going to drive down cost through bulk procurement and accessing suppliers and materials and by giving multiple contracts that enables [companies] to invest in off-site manufacturing and the big objective is to build more competitive, innovative and productively."
Asked if state or taxpayer funds was being risked through buying off the plans, Twyford said "when you're buying land, you always have the land. There's a huge need for affordable homes, only 5 per cent of new builds have been affordable."’