For years, the housing crisis has been framed as a supply issue. Not enough homes are being built, so more need to be delivered. But for businesses operating in construction, the real impact is already showing up somewhere else. It is showing up in margins. As demand accelerates, productivity declines and capacity tightens, the cost […]
Queensland says it needs to deliver around 50,000 homes a year. That is the pace required to meet the state’s long-term housing ambition and respond to the pressure already building across the market. But for all the talk about targets, ambition and approvals, the actual rate of delivery is nowhere near that level. Since 2019,
Not long ago, building a detached home in Australia typically took around six months. Today the average build time sits closer to 10.4 months. That shift means residential building efficiency has effectively fallen by more than 40 percent, meaning the same crew now produces dramatically fewer homes each year than it once did.¹ At first
Australia’s plan to deliver 1.2 million new homes by the end of the decade is already slipping out of reach. Treasury has acknowledged the target will not be met, while the cost of delivering government-backed housing programs has blown out by billions. Public debate has focused on funding, planning approvals and workforce shortages, but a
Queensland Is Not Preparing for a Labour Shortage, It’s Entering One Queensland is not preparing for a construction labour shortage, it is entering one. With less than twelve months before Olympic-related demand accelerates sharply, the industry is moving from forecast risk into lived reality. Projects are already competing for the same workers, timelines are tightening
Australia’s construction sector is locked in a familiar argument. Every shortage is framed as a numbers problem. Not enough workers, not enough trades or not enough labourers to meet demand. Infrastructure Australia estimates a national shortfall of 300,000 construction workers by 2027, while Queensland alone faces a gap of more than 67,000. The instinctive response
Winning a tender feels great, until you realise you’ve got to quickly scale up your crew without blowing your carefully planned budget. Sound familiar? Thankfully, scaling your construction workforce no longer means endless admin or inflated labour costs. Here’s how businesses across Queensland and New South Wales smoothly scale their crews from tender to handover
Labour is one of the biggest cost drivers on any construction site, often accounting for 20 to 40 per cent of total project expenses. At the same time, Australia’s construction productivity has been flat or going backwards for decades, with housing construction now producing only about half as many homes per hour worked as it
Australia is heading into one of the most severe construction labour shortages in its modern history. Infrastructure Australia’s latest national outlook warns that the country will face a shortfall of 300,000 skilled construction workers by 2027, driven by an expanding infrastructure pipeline, rising housing targets and the surge in renewable energy projects. For construction businesses,
Summer is one of the busiest and most volatile period for construction & landscaping businesses across Australia. Demand spikes, deadlines compress and labour availability drops sharply. This blog explains why the summer labour squeeze hits so hard, the real economic consequences and why on demand labour platforms like Casu are becoming essential for small construction
