First published 27 Oct 2026, 10:20am
With pre-fab, homes can now be built in as little as 20 days. So, is everything we think we know about home building about to change?
We chat with Sam Gribble from Metricon, and Damien Crough, Executive Chairman at prefab Aus to look at how pre-fab can accelerate building.
Sam Gribble, General Manager, EveryOne, a division of Metricon Homes
Damien Crough, Executive Chairman, prefab Aus
Daniel Butkovich: How can we build homes faster and cheaper? This is what the prefab industry has been trying to solve: taking construction off the block of land and creating parts of homes in factories.
There is no denying that Aussies would love a solution to building their forever homes without the weather and budget blowouts. Not to mention the fact that Australia has a housing shortage, and we desperately need to get new homes off the ground fast.
Damian, let's start with the basics. When people hear prefab, they might picture a flat pack house or a demountable building, but what are we actually talking about?
Damien Crough: Yeah, that's a good question. And prefab Aus, or the word prefab, is an umbrella term.
We cover lots of different types of construction. It could be flat pack. It could be a kit of parts. It may be a bathroom pod. It may be a whole building, a module. So we're quite fortunate in Australia that we have quite a mature and diverse supply chain that can deliver any one of those things, and we've mapped across Australia the supply chain.
And there's over 1,100 companies in Australia that participate in our supply chain that can deliver any of those forms of prefab, and also any type of material. So whether it's timber, concrete, steel, or composite outcomes.
DB: So, would you say the innovation is not necessarily what the home looks like, but more you know where and how the work gets done?
DC: Yeah, I think what we're seeing is obviously a significant growth in digitisation and technology. So, a shift to industrialised construction, and that's really allowing for greater techniques and to move more of the building offsite into factory-controlled environments, and therefore, you know, getting a greater outcome in respect of quality and performance of buildings.
So we're now talking about highly sophisticated, architecturally designed buildings manufactured with automation and robotics and technology in factories at a really rapid rate, so the industry has changed significantly.
We feel like we've really shifted the needle, I suppose, on what prefab means to most people.
DB: Sam, you work for Metricon, the nation's largest residential home builder, delivering thousands of traditionally built homes every year. But you're stepping into this space in a big way, which is pretty exciting.
The headline that caught everyone's attention: two homes built in 20 days. Sam, can you tell us about this one and what exactly happened?
Sam Gribble: We wanted to do something different to what we've done in the past that would really make a difference to Australia's housing crisis, and we wanted to trial a way of building offsite that sped up what we're doing and changed nothing else in what we deliver to the customer, especially quality.
We're in our 50th year. We've built thousands of homes each year, but we've always built them the same way. We've always built them conventionally with trades on site. But that's not the only exploration we're undertaking in relation to offsite construction.
What caught everyone's attention was the time. The time is remarkable. We built a slab, and then we completed lockup of those homes within four days. Which means you've got a weatherproof home that you can almost live in. It's got bathroom pods that have been installed, so you can actually have a shower within four days.
The doors, windows are locking. Everything's in place for the finishing drains to come in, and that took about another 20 days to complete. You're talking about a home that goes from slab to final completion within a calendar month.
DB: And to set the context for everyone, how long does a build normally take?
SG: So, in a metropolitan city location, a single three bedroom home would take around 60 days to build, and a double story home about 100 days to build.
If you compare that to offsite construction, where we completed a home within 20 days of the slab being constructed, it's quite a significant saving.
DB: How long did that process take offsite?
SG: In this case, the offsite construction was in a factory offshore. That takes about four weeks. Then to be transported, it takes about four weeks to Australia, and then it takes the time that I mentioned for construction on site.
It's important to mention that we're also looking at offsite construction on site in Australia, so we've got opportunities to work with some of the businesses that Damian referred to, where the robotics and factories are here in Australia, in which case those timeframes would be different, particularly a much shorter time frame to bring the materials from the factory to the site.
DB: Damien, do you see this as a breakthrough? This feels like a massive leap, right?
DC: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is fantastic for the industry to see one of the biggest home builders in the country starting to explore and embrace off-site construction. There are other builders who are doing this as well to be used in domestic construction in Class One detached and semi-detached housing.
I think that's where the biggest opportunity is, and what we're seeing is it's the most underrepresented part of the industry for prefab. If we break it down across education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc, there's greater, much greater percentages of the use of offsite and prefabrication, whereas in residential construction.
It's probably around three to 5% currently. Where others, I think education, we're looking at 30-40% of all schools now are prefabricated. So there is a huge opportunity there, and I think there has been some challenges in the past around, you know, how to make it stack up.
And what you've got to remember is that with manufacturing or offsite construction, it relies on volume and scale. And so, someone like Metricon, who has that pipeline, are perfectly suited to explore this and to see how they can make it work within their business.
DB: And Sam, what was the most challenging part of the build?
SG: In some ways, the challenges are more about what happens before the build and what happens on the build. Your trades and so on, once they're well briefed, can actually build homes using off-site construction in a relatively straightforward manner.
Yes, there are some nuances that you need to change to make sure that what you build on site fits perfectly with what's built on site, and those sort of things. But I think the challenges are in the preparation, making sure that the design and compliance of what's built in the factory is exactly as we would expect to see it, exactly as our customers would expect to see it, and meets that metric on quality standard that we and our customers expect.
Bear in mind, this is a pilot. We put a lot of time into making sure all our 'eyes 'I's were dotted and 'T's were crossed during the pre-site phase. As a result, it flowed really smoothly on site in those timeframes.
I think it'd be fair to say if we were building the next two or the next 200, that those timeframes would improve a little bit again.
DB: How many homes does Metricon build every year, and what would need to happen to scale that to about 25% of your annual builds?
SG: We build four to 6000 homes a year. To scale to 25% of that is going to require us to focus on projects. Let's say that's at least 50 homes at a time, and we'll focus on locations where we're really struggling to build conventionally.
So we have really well established systems and processes and suppliers and trades that work really well a lot of the time. And if you take Melbourne, where we are today, for us to build a three bedroom home in three or four months, I think is nothing to complain about, and the value for money that our customers get through that is fantastic.
So right now in Melbourne, it's probably not the perfect time to be using offsite construction. However, let's look around the country in southeast Queensland, where we've got the Olympics coming, and in some regional locations where you've got really strong demand, but really limited trade base.
There's a real need for alternatives to delivering the conventional way. It takes a strategic approach to using offsite construction, where you target the areas where trade base is limited for some reason, and that causes prices to increase, and it causes timeframes to blow out.
If we can then utilise offsite construction to complement what's happening in the conventional construction space, everybody that works in the conventional construction area will be able to continue doing what they do well, and will be able to amplify what's built for Australia by using offsite construction in those locations, so it's unlikely that we're going to be building individual homes at Metricon using offsite construction.
What we'll far more likely be doing is focusing on projects where we can build 10,20, 100 homes in the same location using offsite construction.
DB: So that's what's happening on the building side, but let's talk about what the government's doing. Recently, we've seen the federal government commit $40M to a trial of kit of parts construction and $120M to help the states and territories regulate modern construction methods more consistently.
The government also plans a national voluntary certification scheme to simplify prefab approvals under the National Construction Code.
Damien, why do regulations need to change to make pre fab viable?
DC: So we see the pre fab industry in Australia as an enabler to get the construction sector back to profitability and productivity. Fundamentally, what the federal government has recognised is that the whole built environment around us, so our planning, our regulation, and our financial models have all been developed around building a project on a site, and we don't do that.
We do it in a factory around the world. In other countries like New Zealand, Germany, Japan, China, they've recognised that these are buildings that are built on a production. Line with a quality management system with a process that provides a much better outcome for quality and performance.
So there's recognition that there should be a compliance pathway that allows for those buildings to be streamlined because it is a repetitive system and process that happens in a factory.
So it's a great thing recognition that we don't build on site, and so therefore regulation needs to address the fact that this is a different method. The other thing that's happened, we announced it at our national conference last week, offsite 26 in Melbourne, was a dedicated contract for prefab houses, so that someone can go to Metricon if they want to buy their pre fab house.
That contract recognises that it's being built in the factory, it pays huge upfront deposits of up to 30% which is again recognition that there is a massive amount of procurement that happens by the builder before anything can start in the factory.
Then the milestone payments that happen also recognise how something is manufactured on a production line. So we're really starting to see some significant changes. The government making changes around regulation, providing some support to states to streamline planning, and the new voluntary certification scheme that the Australian Building Codes Board are developing.
We think are going to create some significant growth in the sector. For a long time, the funding has been a real issue because what would happen is you could only get a five or 10% deposit to pay for your building, and then the manufacturer or the builder would have to fund the rest of that until it gets to site.
Now, with the Commonwealth Bank, they can receive up to 80% of the value of the project while it's in the factory. So that really does unlock the potential for the manufacturer. It means they can take on more work and they can deliver more houses, and we will never be 100% of the industry.
We're enabling the construction sector to get back to productivity and to meet the targets that have been set, like the national housing accord of 1.2 million homes. Without that, we can't get there. But we still need all the trades, and we still need conventional construction.
DB: Okay, so the federal kit of parts trial is based on a model in which 80% of components are made offsite using standardised processes, and 20% is tailored on site. So even the most factory-friendly model is not 100% factory-made.
Sam, why does customsation remain essential?
SG: Customisation is important for a customer to end up with a home that they need, but that doesn't necessarily mean complete individualised customisation of a home.
And if you look at what's available without using offsite construction today, what you generally find in at least in the volume building sector is that you've got some fantastic house designs and floor plans and facades, and then they can tinker as customers with the things that matter to them in their kitchen and their bathrooms and so on-that doesn't affect off-site construction.
Offsite construction can be standardised in, I would say, the same way that designs of homes conventionally are undertaken today, so that the bulk of the home can be built in a factory in a consistent way, and you can still give customers the opportunity to tailor things to suit them and their tastes and preferences.
So I don't think there needs to be a trade-off, if you like, in relation to offsite construction. And we're very adamant within Metric on that what we put out as a product, whether we're building it conventionally or off-site, needs to meet the same quality and customer expectations. So we wouldn't adopt a compromised approach.
DB: Moving on, one of the biggest questions consumers have is, will it make it cheaper? Sam, pre fab makes construction more efficient, but does that show up in the price paid by buyers?
SG: The classic answer: It depends. It depends what you're comparing to first. In the Melbourne market today, we build very efficiently conventionally. The supply chain's pretty good. The balance between supply and demand is quite favourable. So we don't think there is a pricing benefit in going to offsite construction in Melbourne.
Let's stay in the same state and we go to some country towns like a place like Hamilton or Warrnambool or Wodonga, which are hours from Melbourne, the cost of building the same home that you build in Melbourne might be 20% higher, and so you're starting to compare the cost base in the factory, which is roughly the same whether you transport it to Melbourne or whether you transport it to Wodonga or Warrnambool.
The cost differential then starts to make more sense, so it's a matter of choosing the right locations for offsite construction, which really focus on the areas where the trade base is limited. Therefore, they struggle to deliver capacity, the same price point to deliver in that same time frame, with that mindset, we can really see a lot of potential for this in the future by delivering projects in locations where there is a constraint on supply, and I think that's at a town level.
If you roll that all up to Australia and you start looking at the 1.2 million homes target that we might only make to you know 800,000 based on current projections.
Well, can we look at helping deliver that other 400,000 homes by using offsite construction in certain areas where they simply can't be delivered conventionally?
DB: Damien, the size of the pre fab industry in Australia is still quite small if we're comparing to other countries. Does the fact that it's not more widespread, not operating on a larger scale, impact the ability to pass savings along to buyers?
DC: No, I think really what the challenges are we have is that scale. We're talking about manufacturing, and we're talking about a completely different process. So when you're designing a home that's going to be built on site, it's not typically 100% complete in design before it starts because you're building conventionally.
Chippies are on site; they can make adjustments. You kind of can make it up a bit as you go. With pre fab, it is running through a factory, therefore the design process has to be completely resolved before you start anything.
There really is a lot of knowledge transfer that needs to happen, and there's a lot of industry up-skilling that also needs to happen around the design and the process. Because if you look at other industries, if you look at automotive, you if you look at the aerospace industry, they are highly sophisticated products that are built in large factories with thousands of supplies that come from hundreds of companies that come to one place that are assembled into a beautiful aircraft or a vehicle.
We can do that with housing, but it's a different process. We really need to understand that the benefit of manufacturing is scale and volume. The process is very upfront design heavy. Once you get that right, then what you see is significant productivity increases and cost decreases.
So if you look at cars, for example, and airplanes, they've gone up in productivity and downing price. That's a fact because they use automation, they use manufacturing, they use robotics. They use technology. So what we need to see is that real shift, and it is starting to happen in Australia.
It is happening not as quickly as we'd like to see it happen, but we've got factories in Melbourne, like the Modscape factory, that have robots that can produce significant amounts of housing, two, 3000 homes a year.
There's a new factory that's opened in South Australia recently called Five North, they have 14 robots in their production line. They can produce 37 square meters of housing every 10 minutes. We're starting to see this scale happen. We've got factories in Orange in regional New South Wales for green timber technology.
We've got companies all around Australia who are investing, who are scaling up and getting ready. But it is a volume thing, if you're doing a one-off of anything, it's expensive. But when you've got scale, when you've got large, repetitious like townhouses and and that type of product in residential construction, then that's where we're going to see significant product gains.
DB: Pre fab sounds pretty neat inside a factory, but outside of a factory, Australia is not neat. We're a large country, long distances, different planning systems, different climates, and a building industry still working out how to regulate modern methods. Sam, what are some potential pitfalls of pre fab?
SG: You're right in putting out the weather around Australia, but one of the benefits of offsite construction is you get out of the weather quicker. You can get from slab to lock up in four days.
Your trades can work out of the weather, whatever's outside. Transport and logistics are the areas that you need to focus on. We're not convinced that full volumetric construction, which means transporting the complete home on the back of a truck, is going to work in in low rise construction, and it does bring in significant transport costs.
It brings in logistics, like making sure power lines are not hanging too low when the truck's traveling to that location. You know, you have to map the transport route to check for power lines. So that's quite a challenge. So we probably think it's it's less likely to be volumetric, more likely to be if you like a flat pack kind of style of construction, and then it's a matter of getting the logistics right on site.
If we're going to have a crane there for one home, let's have a crane there for 20 homes or 50 homes. If we're going to build by having containers dropped off with materials in it, let's make sure we've got a location for that that's efficient for the site.
Let's train up the trades to be able to build these homes not once but 20 times or 50 times. So I think it is a volume game. There's a natural connection here between what we're doing and what the industry is doing. We just need to make that work for both of us.
It needs to work for the offsite construction businesses so that they have a relatively steady demand pipeline because that allows them to price effectively and provide value for money. So we need to think about that as well.
DB: One worry that consumers might have is quality. Supporters would say the controlled factory conditions can improve quality control, but critics might say a defect created in a factory can be repeated hundreds of times.
Damien, how would you protect against scaling?
DC: Yeah, look, it's a good question, but if you've been into any of our members' factories around Australia, you'd be fairly confident that you're going to get a high-quality, high-performing product because a lot of the advanced manufacturing that's starting to happen, it's based off other industries like a referred to earlier automotive sector.
So, for example, when I was involved in developing building system called United Building, we did this back. We started in 2007. We brought it to the market with Hickory Group in 2010. We had a factory in Melbourne. We did 16 buildings in three years. It was pretty hectic time, and we used automation. But what happened at that time was all of the engineers from Ford and Holden that could see the writing on the wall, they started getting out, and so we were able to secure really good talent from the automotive industry.
And there's so much expertise that was floating around at the time that has been transitioned into the construction sector. So what you start to see is production lines that are based on car and other production lines.
So, what you see is standard operating procedures. You see inspection test plans. You see highly detailed documentation of every process of every time the plumber does his work or the electrician, and it's signed off and it's photographed and it's referenced and it's embedded into the digital model as well.
A lot of our members who are manufacturers and builders, they're using digital tools. They're using Revit, for example, as a 3D modelling BIM, building information management. They're embedding all of that into it. So what you're getting is absolute knowledge of what has been assembled and put together.
So if there is at some point an issue or a defect or a failure, it's a lot easier to trace. You can work out which buildings it went into, or which part it went into, and where those parts have gone. So it's a lot different to on site, where you know at the end of the day you get an occupancy certificate and you hand it over a set of keys, and you don't really know too much about how it was put together or who put it together at what time.
Whereas in a factory, it's all controlled, it's all captured, and all that data is embedded into a model. So I think we're seeing high quality buildings, but to your point, if there was a defect, it's traceable because there's a lot of transparency around how things are done.
With the development of this voluntary certification scheme with the Australian Building Codes Board, I think what we're going to see is a lot greater application of things like ISO standards within factories, so I think it's only going to be a really good thing for the industry.
DB: Okay, so I'm going to ask some rapid fire takeaways. Sam, what was the biggest learning of the 20 day Metric on pilot?
SG: What was the biggest learning of the 20-day Metric on pilot? We were staggered to realise that we could improve our build times, which we already thought were efficient by so much, so timing is amazing.
And Damian, what is the biggest misconception about pre fab?
DC: The biggest misconception about prefab is that it's standard, cheap, and temporary, whereas it's absolutely not that anymore.
DB: Sam, which part of the building process should be moved into a factory first?
SG: Part of the building process that should be moved in the factory first is the standardised structural elements of the home that allow us to get to a weatherproof home fastest. So wall panels and roof panels.
DB: And Damien, what is the biggest risk to prefab in Australia?
DC: I think the biggest risk to prefab in Australia is not changing our planning, regulation, and financial models to suit the way we build in a factory.
SG: Pre fab doesn't change the customer outcome. Customer still gets a quality home that they get to choose according to their budget.
DB: Great, and this one's for both of you. We'll start with Damien first. Damien, what needs to happen to make prefab homes accelerate in Australia?
DC: To make prefab homes accelerate in Australia, we need wider adoption by volume builders who have the scale that can recognise the productivity and cost benefits.
DB: And Sam, what needs to happen to make prefab homes accelerate in Australia
SG: To enable prefab homes to increase in Australia. There needs to be a marketing exercise to help assure people that the quality of the home that they are getting is as good, if not better, than they have become accustomed to through conventional construction.
DB : Thank you both for joining me today. It's been such an interesting discussion on what is a really important topic. Thank you.
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