Slab to lock-up in four days: Are quick-build homes the way of Perth’s future?

In the middle of a housing shortage, a Perth tech company is aiming to revolutionise the way the world builds, with the first of 400 four-day built homes completed in Perth’s south.

The newly built display home in Treeby Park Estate in the City of Kwinana was brought from slab to lock-up in just four days, with the final home finished in five weeks.

The transformational residential housing project will boost housing supply in WA, delivering over 400 affordable homes in the area.Credit: NXT TEC

NXT TEC chairman and managing director Natasha Di Ciano said the pre-manufactured homes were not the typical pre-fabricated houses most commonly used as quick installation housing alternatives.

Di Ciano said the NXT TEC system could be delivered cheaper than regular brick-and-tile homes due to precision manufacturing offsite with pre-built concrete and steel components assembled onsite, similar to Lego.

The Kwinana project is also aided by a manufacturing casting facility set up nearby in Anketell, significantly reducing transport costs.

“We’ve all heard the saying ‘WA – wait awhile’, that needs to change,” Di Ciano said.

While the first project was intended to meet a specific need for low-rise accommodation in the locality, Di Ciano said the product was also designed for high-rise development, recognising the limitations of Perth’s urban sprawl.

“The technology has been designed for high-rise, it just hasn’t been applied into the residential sector because it’s usually expensive if you don’t have the tech or method of manufacturing and understanding of sequencing,” she said.

“We’ve got the tech, manufacturing and sequencing, that’s why we can make it affordable.”

A new Property Council report released in November said despite the state government’s target that 47 per cent of new developments in WA should be “infill” in established areas, it only reached 31 per cent in 2022 – the rest being sprawl on the urban fringe.

The report said to meet the housing targets set by the National Housing Accord, which aims to alleviate the national crisis, WA would need to be delivering five times the number of apartments per year it currently is.

But completion rates for infill developments are headed south; while about 2366 apartments are being completed this year, projected completions for 2025 fall dramatically to just over 600.

There are more than 10,000 apartments approved for WA but effectively on hold and unable to be constructed.

The report blamed the climbing and highly volatile construction costs driven by labour shortages and competition for labour from government and mining sectors.

It estimated that post-COVID construction costs had risen 30 per cent nationally, with even higher rises reported in WA.

Di Ciano said an essential component to ease WA’s construction gridlock came down to the need to streamline planning approval and land title releases with stronger collaboration between the public and private sectors.

“Look at how many homes need to be built in WA, the way we’ll achieve it is if we work together and use technology that enables that to happen to get homes built and give people a place to live,” she said.

NXT TEC recently secured a permit to build a five-star hotel six kilometres from Perth’s CBD to demonstrate the system’s versatility on a large-scale development.

Expected to be delivered in 12 months, the hotel will be the first of its kind to be assembled, rather than constructed.

Rooms will include bathroom pods, prefabricated, fully fitted bathroom lifted and installed onsite.

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