Workers are earning an extra $1100 per week in this high-paid industry
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Sydney Morning Herald
12 minutes ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
How Laura's stylish house was built twice as fast as normal
Traditionally-built houses take more than a year from approval to completion, according to ABS and AMP data. Prefab and modular experts say they can get more homes built affordably, up to 50 per cent faster, and with fewer disruptions. Prefabricated components are made in a factory and assembled on site; modular sections are factory-produced and combined on site. Prefab modular is a hybrid. Governments need to commit up to 70 per cent of social housing projects to prefab or modular, to achieve the kind of scale that will reduce costs, says Dr Ehsan Noroozinejad, a senior researcher and global challenge lead at Western Sydney University. 'We need some sort of support from the government,' he says. 'We cannot push the private sector and the community alone to use this technology.' The Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), a joint body of the federal and state and territory governments, released a handbook last year on how to use modern methods in line with the National Construction Code, and is developing a voluntary certification scheme for manufacturers. However, prefab and modular is still unfamiliar to some councils and building certifiers, who are the guardians of permits and approvals, experts say. A lack of understanding is delaying what should be a speedy option. Noroozinejad says there is not enough training in how to approve the final product, and the voluntary scheme will be more effective if it were compulsory. 'The certifiers and the councils are not familiar with this technology, or they believe that it is not suitable for their area because of cultural heritage value,' he says. 'If the process is streamlined, this type of technology should be very efficient. Otherwise, it's not working.' Jennings' home is the work of Prebuilt, a prefabricated modular manufacturer with a base in Kilsyth and another near Newcastle in NSW. Prebuilt chief executive Malcolm Batten says incorrect perceptions of modular have held it back from wider adoption. 'When the average person thinks modular, they think of flimsy, temporary and cheap, and the permanent buildings we do are not flimsy,' he says. 'They're very strong and will last as long, or longer, than a conventional build.' Prebuilt has constructed hotels, family homes, granny flats, farmhouses and beach retreats, from Sydney's high-end Mosman to the hamlet of Lorne, on Victoria's Great Ocean Road. However, some councils are so uncertain about what modular means, they scotch planning applications that come across their desk. Loading 'In one of them in NSW, we can't put a modular building there because their statutes talk about modular like it's a caravan, and so you're not allowed to because it comes in on the back of the truck,' Batten says. Another hindrance has been access to finance, leaving home owners to meet 90 per cent of upfront costs or enter into arrangements with their builder, as Jennings did. Many banks have been unwilling to make progress payments to builders when the asset – the block of land – is not gaining value while construction occurs elsewhere. However, their stance is softening. The Commonwealth Bank has changed its lending criteria after collaborating with industry group PrefabAUS, and now provides prefab and modular home loans of up to 60 per cent of the contract price. Damien Crough, co-founder and executive chair of PrefabAUS and managing director of Advanced Offsite Group, says companies were shouldering the financial risk, which limited their growth. 'Planning, regulation and financial models all need to be adjusted to recognise off-site construction,' he says, 'and so that's what we've been working on.' PrefabAUS members have drafted an advice paper for the treasurer on barriers to financing and Crough is assisting the ABCB in streamlining industry definitions. Tahi Merrilees and his Wild Modular co-founder Alex Tattle launched their company in 2021 after years on old-fashioned building sites. 'We got sick of trudging around in mud and being delayed, and it got to a point where we just started looking at better ways to build,' Merrilees says. The Sydney-based company has just delivered three social houses in Wollongong for the NSW government under a pilot program. All were handed over within six months, but the build time was only three-and-a-half weeks. To help facilitate loans, Merrilees and Tattle have set up live-feed cameras in their Wetherill Park factory to track progress of projects. The transparency has compelled more lenders to fund their projects, from Tasmania to WA and the Whitsundays. 'There's change happening to make it smoother,' Merrilees says. 'That's going to have a massive impact on housing supply as the industry grows.' Noroozinejad says only 4 per cent to 5 per cent of Australian housing is prefab, compared to European countries such as Sweden, where it is 84 per cent. To increase output, he proposes empty car manufacturing plants be repurposed as prefab housing factories. 'We have the capacity and very positive feedback from the industry,' he says. Jennings, an experienced renovator, has been astonished by what modular can achieve. 'I love the level of finish,' she says. 'After doing renovations that have gone way too long, the build time was extraordinary.'
Sydney Morning Herald
12 minutes ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
This couple spent $500 trying to buy their dream home. They never stood a chance
Clutching a bright yellow bidding panel, amid a crowd of onlookers stretched across a concrete driveway, Rebecca Borkman was quietly hopeful she was about to secure her dream home. Advertised at just $700,000, the two-bedroom townhouse in the Sydney suburb of Bankstown was within the budget of Borkman and her partner, Byron Tolley, with $150,000 to spare. The couple were so serious about the home that they had shelled out more than $500 to obtain pest, building and strata reports in preparation, and discussed bidding tactics. But it soon became clear they never stood a chance. What Borkman, 33, didn't know when she arrived at the auction was that the reserve price for the property was $850,000, more than 20 per cent above the advertised guide. The sale had lured 18 registered bidders, and the townhouse sold for $896,000. 'As soon as that auction started, we were wondering why we even bothered showing up or getting excited,' Borkman said. 'If they let us know that the reserve was anywhere even around $800,000, we wouldn't have put so much time and money into it. But they [the agent] were firm on the $700,000 guide.' Scenes like this are repeated at weekend auctions across the country. In response to an online survey, almost 5600 people told this masthead's Bidding Blind investigation that they had spent money and time investigating properties that they would later discover they could not afford. A separate data analysis of more than 36,000 auction listings reveals that more often than not Sydneysiders and Melburnians are being misled by advertised price guides. That means Australians are forking out thousands of dollars on multiple pest and building inspections, contract reviews and strata reports during extended property hunts, only for the homes they had fallen in love with to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars above the guide. Several Victorian buyers said they had recently paid for a building inspection on homes advertised within their budget. Then, even though auction bidding surpassed the top end of the sale guide – sometimes by hundreds of thousands of dollars – the home was passed in because it didn't meet the vendor's reserve. 'Agents often argue that it's the buyers and auctions that drive up the price, but conversations with the agent often indicate early on that the buyer wants a much higher rate than advertised,' said one of these prospective buyers. Another buyer looking in Sydney's inner west, a hotspot for underquoting complaints, said it felt like they were being constantly scammed. 'We are often lied to about vendor expectations and then spend money on building reports, contract reviews by lawyers ... We recently had an experience where the auction guide was $1.7 million and the reserve was closer to $2.2 million.' Following the Bidding Blind investigation, the Victorian and NSW governments are facing pressure from industry groups, consumers and opposition parties to stem the tide of wasted cash by overhauling underquoting laws. Victoria's peak real estate lobby group announced it would support the mandatory pre-auction disclosure of reserve prices by sellers, a significant policy shift for a group long resistant to such a proposal. Key real estate industry leaders in NSW have also backed that model, with both state governments promising to seek advice or continue consultation on potential solutions. Another idea to stem the cost of inaccurate price guides is to require vendors to provide prospective purchasers with free building and pest inspections before auction, as is the case in the ACT. 'There will still be buyers who will want to get their own independent report, but this removes the cost and the double up for a large portion of buyers, and it would directly remove the financial harm of underquoting,' said Consumer Policy Research Centre chief executive Erin Turner. In NSW, agents are required to provide prospective purchasers with a contract of sale and disclose issues such as whether the property has been subject to recent flooding, has any external combustible cladding or has been the scene of a murder or manslaughter in the past five years. In Victoria, sellers are legally required to provide a 'section 32 vendor's statement', which details information about any easements, zonings, strata scheme management and fees and whether a property is in a bushfire-prone area. However, buyers in both states are encouraged to seek their own building inspections, which usually cost between $300 and $1000 depending on the size of the property and whether a pest inspection is included. Contract reviews, also recommended, will generally cost $200 or $300. And in NSW, buyers have to pay a fee to access strata reports. 'It's not unusual to get 30 or 40 people through a home … let's just say half of them [arranged inspections and other due diligence] – there's 15 grand down the toilet,' said buyers agent Paul Mulligan. Loading 'There are a lot of gutted buyers out there, and what ends up happening is even worse than the cost [because] they go out and then they buy a place out of frustration, and potentially overpay or buy a lemon. It's huge. It's a huge consumer cost, emotionally and financially.' Victorian buyers advocate David Morrell, who described underquoting as 'cheating', said the practice came with an 'opportunity cost' for prospective buyers who missed out on properties when they didn't obtain access to enough pre-approved finance due to misleading price guides. 'If the agent hadn't lied to you at the start, you'd be living in your favourite home,' Morrell said. As a former property manager at a real estate agency, Rebecca Borkman felt like she should have been in a better position than most to navigate the auction process when she was searching for a home in Sydney last year. But the human resources professional said her experience was so painful that she eventually refused to consider buying any property that was being auctioned. Borkman and her partner instead bought a home in Carlingford, in Sydney's north-west, through a private sale. 'If something came up for auction, we would immediately write it off the list, no matter how much it suited our needs, because it was so damaging to our bank account, to our self-esteem and to our emotional wellbeing,' she said. 'If even I, with that experience [of being a property manager] in my past, feel almost scammed, then what's someone who has no idea what they're getting themselves into meant to do?' Borkman said the reason they had fallen in love with the Bankstown townhouse, with its front and back garden and 297-square-metre block, was because it had been undervalued by the $700,000 auction guide. 'The minute that we showed up there and looked at the property, I thought, 'This is so far beyond anything else that we had seen within that price range' … as it turns out, we were looking at a property that was worth $900,000.'
The Age
12 minutes ago
- The Age
The problem with taking advice from ‘finfluencers'
For better or worse, now when people go looking for life advice or want to find answers to burning questions, the place we increasingly turn to is social media. And sure, there are a lot of areas in our lives where this can be great. Suggestions on how to use up half a can of chickpeas or learning how to braid your hair is one thing. But when it comes to things like our health and finances, the risks associated with getting advice from unqualified influencers are exponentially higher. That's one of the reasons that I was happy to see that the Australian Securities and Investments Commissions recently took part in a global crackdown on financial influencers, also known as 'finfluencers', along with regulators from the United Kingdom, Italy, Hong Kong, Canada and the United Arab Emirates. Following the crackdown, ASIC commissioner Alan Kirkland explained: 'It's important that consumers separate fun from fact when it comes to influencer content. Popularity doesn't equal credibility.' In other words, a finfluencer might have 100,000 people eager to listen to what they have to say, but that doesn't mean they have the qualifications, expertise or a legal right to be saying it in the first place. In the UK alone, the regulator issued 650 requests for content to be removed from social media, 50 takedown requests to websites being operated by influencers, and seven cease and desist letters. The regulators also invited four influencers in for interviews, and made three arrests. In Australia, though, the fallout was much smaller, with ASIC issuing just 18 warning notices to financial influencers suspected of providing unlicensed financial advice and/or unlawfully spruiking high-risk financial products. Loading As tempting as it might be to think that our markedly smaller numbers are a sign of Australian finfluencers being better, more honest people than those in other nations, that's not quite it. The main reason for our A+ performance is a thing called INFO 269, which are guidelines ASIC issued in 2022 specifically outlining the rules and regulations for social media influencers offering financial advice. In addition to breaking down the legal standards influencers are required to meet before discussing or promoting stocks, financial products or investment funds, the guidelines also make the consequences of breaking any rules crystal clear: up to five years in jail, or fines of over $1 million. These threats aren't idle, either. In 2021, ASIC successfully filed a lawsuit against Tyson Scholz, an Australian finfluencer who dubbed himself the 'ASX Wolf'. At the time, Scholz was offering stock tips via paid online subscriber groups to his Instagram followers, which sat at well over 100,000 people. At the time, though, Scholz did not hold a valid financial services licence, meaning his advice specifically on what stocks to buy was against the law. By 2023, he was facing bankruptcy over a $450,000 court-imposed debt from the regulator. And it's not just finance influencers who are being closely watched and regulated, either. In 2022, the Therapeutic Goods Administration announced restrictions on how influencers post about products such as vitamins, protein powders, supplements, sunscreen, medical devices and medicines. These changes mean influencers must clearly disclose if they are in partnership with a brand, and they also cannot share their personal experience with therapeutic products.
