Exclusive Steel Homes, Newport director opens up on heartbreaking company collapse
The director of a luxe home building company has opened up about the “heartbreaking” collapse of the family-owned Moreton business, which has fallen over owing $850,000 to creditors.
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The director of a luxury southeast Queensland home building company has opened up about the “heartbreaking” collapse of the family-owned business, which has fallen over owing about $850,000 to creditors.
Exclusive Steel Homes, based at Newport in the Moreton council area, has gone into liquidation with Worrells in charge of the process.
The business, started in 2017 by two families, employed five staff and built about 40 houses and units from Moreton and Logan to Brisbane.
Director Richard Oliver-Parker said they tried their best to keep the company afloat and to work with suppliers, whom they owed $850,000.
“It’s heartbreaking, to be honest. We tried everything to keep the company cracking,’’ he said.
“We tried to negotiate with suppliers, who we owed money to, but they said they don’t get their insurance unless we go into liquidation so they pushed that side of things.
“We gave it everything we’ve got, we really did try.
“We were still able to finish all the homes. There was one who ended their contract but that wasn’t far out from being finished, so we didn’t want to let our customers down.
“We’re proud we were able to finish all the homes, that was really important to us because suppliers have insurance and things in place, although we still wished we didn’t have to.
“With customers, if you let them down, it really impacts their lives and we couldn’t do that.”
Mr Oliver-Parker, from Carindale, said the struggles really hit the company in 2022 when the cost of supplies increased dramatically.
‘We had just signed a fixed price contract and had all the quotes for supplies and everything,’’ he said.
“Then, about two months later, we went to put in an order and that quote wasn’t valid anymore, it had gone up,” he said.
“We couldn’t believe it had gone up such a silly amount of money.
“But the price rises were something we had to suck up as we couldn’t put that on our client because of the fixed price contract.
“Then last year the lack of trades really was another big hit.
“We were getting charged double or even triple compared to the prices before.
“Jobs turned into 12 months instead of eight and we had a backlog of jobs we couldn’t get through because of that.
“In the last year we’ve just been trying to get all the homes over the line.
“We tried to regroup and sort out a way forward .
“We had a great relationship with most suppliers, except for a few big companies who just wanted to claim their insurance.”
Mr Oliver-Parker said their priority was to “minimise the damage” as much as possible.
He said their situation was indicative of the whole construction industry’s struggles.
“You can always look back and wish you did things differently, but the whole industry is in turmoil,” he said.
“The builders are stuck in the middle of something they have no control over and there’s not a lot of support out there.
“We’re in the middle of an insolvency crisis and builders are at the top of that.”
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Originally published as Exclusive Steel Homes, Newport director opens up on heartbreaking company collapse
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