Easing Our Housing Crisis - An Engineered Solution

Easing Our Housing Crisis - An Engineered Solution

Media Release – 20 September 2017

Perfectly poised to solve our housing shortages is mass timber manufacturing, already common in Australia. The new engineered wood factories are set to grow our capacity to speed up quality house-building right now in New Zealand. That’s the view of our wood engineers organising a high-technology engineered wood building conference next week in Rotorua.

If our New Zealand can replicate wood panel plants that are commonplace in Europe and Canada it will add plenty of building capacity. It will go a long way to solving the housing supply shortage, says Rotorua engineer, John Stulen, of the Forest Industry Engineering Association, organiser of a national wood technology conference next Thursday.

One of the leading suppliers of multi-residential wood buildings in Australia is Strongbuild. Their business development manager, Shane Strong, will discuss their off-site manufacturing model at the “Changing Perceptions” annual conference in Rotorua next week.

Strongbuild launched in 2000 with a vision to create a streamlined building systems removing variables of on-site building practices. They soon expanded into multi-residential buildings and community housing. They’ve now delivered award winning townhouse communities, residential apartments and vertical retirement villages, including Australia’s largest CLT building project – The Gardens at Macarthur Gardens in Campbelltown, Sydney.

“Alongside Shane Strong and two other experts from Australia, we’ll have Karla Fraser of Urban One Builders, senior project manager of Tallwood House, the world’s tallest timber building in Vancouver, as our keynote speaker,” says Stulen.

“Karla will share here experience from the 18-storey build on how mass timber manufactured components save time and money for large multi-residential buildings. Everywhere Karla Fraser goes, people grasp the concept very quickly – because the proof is there from the Tallwood House where they led the world,” he adds.

He explains, “What the big Australian builders, developers and manufacturers in wood have done can be done here too, to boost our supply of affordable new housing. The newest high volume wood panel plants by Lendlease, Strongbuild and XLAM in Australia are now delivering added capacity over there, but there is room for far more supply to meet demand.”

“Right now here in New Zealand we need at least one or two more large wood panel manufacturing plants. They could soon dramatically change the supply side for single family and multi-residential homes in Auckland and beyond.”

Next week’s national event is entitled “The Advantages of Timber in Mid-Rise Construction.” It's the second annual conference on mass timber construction. The conference runs in Rotorua on 28 September. See: www.cpetc2017.com to register. Over 120 architects, developers and builders are already registered.

It’s all part of wood technology week in Rotorua this month with the long-running FIEA WoodTECH 2017 two-day conference and trade expo. Rotorua Lakes Council are partners through their “Wood-First” policy. The diverse programme attracts building owners, developers, architects, engineers, specifiers and key engineered wood suppliers.

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