Adelaide house builder Rivergum restructures to focus on medium-density projects, cuts jobs

One of SA’s largest home builders has announced a major change in its business plan, resulting in job losses.

Rivergum’s new strategy is to focus on medium-density townhouses, like its The Palms collection at the Riverlea housing estate.

One of South Australia’s largest and best-known home builders has stopped taking orders from individual customers, doubling down on major townhouse projects as part of a major shake up that’s resulted in a small number of job losses.

Established by Victor Said more than 30 years ago, Rivergum Homes has made its name as one of the state’s largest builders of traditional detached houses, completing hundreds of new homes each year.

However as part of a restructure outlined to its 100-odd staff last week, the company has closed its book to new individual customers, and will instead focus on partnering with developers on infill and medium-density housing projects across Adelaide.

Rivergum chairman Roger Zammit confirmed the restructure had resulted in five redundancies in the company’s sales team, while close to 270 individual customers would have their homes completed before the company makes a full transition out of its retail business.

“The decision we made was that we would be far better off in trying to help the federal and state governments achieve their objective around more homes for South Australia by ... us re-appropriating all of our resources over time into being not only South Australia’s largest medium-density home builder ... but also all our energy going into that one part of the residential sector,” he said.

Rivergum Homes managing director Victor Said.

“From a staff perspective, the disruption is fairly minimal. We believe that we will be able to redeploy all our existing staff into the medium-density side of the business, and then we still believe, based on what we’re forecasting as our future, that we will still be needing to complement that with more people.”

According to the latest HIA-Colorbond steel Housing 100 report, Rivergum started work on 159 houses and 294 semi-detached homes in the 12 months to June last year, making it the third-largest home builder in South Australia and the fourth-largest builder of semi-detached homes nationally.

As part of the restructure, the company will spend the next two years transitioning out of its retail business, which builds houses for individual customers, and will instead focus solely on its own development projects as well as partnering with developers on infill housing projects across Adelaide.

South Australia remains the primary focus, after previous forays into the Victorian and Queensland markets.

Mr Said said the company had recently secured a large slice of land at the former TAFE site at Panorama, which had been earmarked for more than 50 townhouses, while it had also won a contract to deliver 30 townhouses for MAB Corporation at the former Brompton Gasworks site.

“Over recent years we have experienced exponential growth in the projects side of our business, delivering medium density product in partnership with tier one listed and private master plan developers as well as the government of South Australia,” he said.

“We have over 1000 residences in our projects pipeline and we’re planning to announce an additional 200 in just the next six months as we look to grow this opportunity even further.”

Originally published as Adelaide house builder Rivergum restructures to focus on medium-density projects, cuts jobs