An Australian endangered species – Owner builders

Jan 17, 2025
Man building a house.

High house prices are usually reckoned to be a product of supply, demand and the self- interests of the finance industry. This piece sets out a case for a fourth factor – post de-regulation regulatory stupidity. I have illustrated issues with examples from Gippsland in Victoria, but I suspect that the problems are nationwide.

Once upon a time, Australians quite often built their own homes. Many families got by on single incomes. If a partner had a few building skills, but not much in the way of family savings, the family could build themselves a home and have a tangible asset at the end.

They often started small and extended as the family grew. Some did some of the work themselves, some did a lot of the work themselves. Vern Slater, a Trafalgar man I knew, started his family’s build by identifying some suitable trees in his dad’s bush block and setting up an improvised sawmill to cut the house framing timber he needed.

Those with a narrower set of skills could follow the cultural example in the novel and film They’re a Weird Mob and work out co-operative arrangements with family and friends. Labour and materials barter were big in the golden days of Australian owner building.

So was the concept of sweat equity. Owner builders often carried on with more than one day-job because they had a family to feed while the build was on.

Way back then, councils, then the main building regulatory authorities, usually tolerated, even supported owner building. They insisted on licensed electricians and proper plumbers, but were known to sometimes cut a bit of slack and be helpful to building battlers.

The expectations of young couples were more modest too. There were no social media “influencers” to promote the view that lack of a home theatre, three bathrooms and a formal dining room were sure predictors of marital discord. The minimum socially expected standard for newlyweds of a McMansion hadn’t yet been set by advertising. This meant less size-anxiety for owner builders.

Changes in building regulation and industry practices are now driving the frugal owner builder species toward extinction. Concurrently, banks are vastly over-harvesting cash from their housing punters. The end result, in my opinion, is a tottering ponzi of national housing debt.

Once upon a time, local bank managers were paid to know their customers and their credit-worthiness. Today, loan-making decisions are being flicked to online algorithms. The dwindling band of tellers is now tasked with dealing with angry customers when policy settings from on high have hit a customer badly. When I asked at my local Bendigo branch about the possibility of a contingency loan, should the need arise, I was told, “The bank has a policy of not lending to owner builders” . I found another Moe bank who would lend, and a third with “Possibly, but probably not”. The Bendigo’s credit ban is presumably based on the number of owner-builder defaults. So, what can go wrong?

The eastern end of Albert St in Moe gives an example. The street runs from the CBD, past the town’s main primary school, and bumps to a stop at a disused railway embankment. Dotted along the east end are weatherboard and fibro houses from the fifties, resting happily on their stumps, typically 4×4 inch concrete posts, dug perhaps a foot into the ground and sitting off a few shovelfuls of concrete. There’s also typical 70s brick veneers, resting on 200mm slabs- on -ground, with no signs of wall cracking or other structural problems after 50 years.

The bigger blocks and former horse paddocks have now been rezoned and today’s project homes are being squeezed into the little blocks thus created. The new houses are the products of today’s commercial building industry, which typically uses “cost plus“ contracts in their sales arrangements.

Now, you’d think that the judgment of the council building staff who approved the construction of the older homes, judgment verified by 70 years of field testing, would be helpful in minimising costs to new home buyers. But you’d be wrong!

Today, residential structural engineering can be done by feeding some parameters into a computer and having it churn out reams of electronic “computations”, to which a properly qualified engineer can affix their electronic signature. The days of engineers slaving over a slide rule or calculator for innovative ways to use less materials or reduce labour costs seem to be gone. Rather, I suspect that some residential structural engineers have a weather eye more on the cost of their professional indemnity insurance. Sure, it could be done cheaper and better, but why should I take a risk? Safer to just over-engineer and pass on the costs.

Back on Albert St, the actual evidence of time, and the mandated individual soil tests to check the ground’s safe weight carrying capacity, now count for naught. A blanket rating of the soils under all the houses has been pronounced. Our residential structural engineer now has only to act on the prescription — in lay terms — Albert St has been retrospectively deemed to have been a swamp all along, and this requires special treatment to stop its buildings falling over.

To deal with the structural challenges of our hypothetical swamp, all new buildings and extensions in Albert St now require a thicket of concrete piers under their slabs or floors. Modern house slabs are thicker/stronger/lighter, and so much better at distributing the weight of the home evenly on the ground, but precedents have already been created, so it’s a brave engineer who would ignore the trend. Concrete piers under slabs are today’s engineering fashion in Albert St.

The piers are created by boring a grid of 400 mm diameter holes in rows and then filling the holes with concrete. The slab is then set out and poured atop the piers.  The piers can be up to three metres deep. We are needlessly burying a lot of greenhouse gas producing concrete in Albert St.

The additional cost of the piers, $10,000 to $20,000-plus, is simply passed to the client as part of the ”cost plus” contract. Banks are happy to add some money to the loan – more interest, more bonuses.

Owner builders, typically, do not have the resources to question the results of regulation. Experienced building workers shake their heads at the idiocies of “the system”.

Judith, the widow of Vern, our Trafalgar owner builder of the sixties, still lives in the home he built. Owner built homes such as theirs are an expression of individuality and the values of mateship, family, community and cooperation. These values are now being negated by the plethora of industry created regulation.

We were told that the privatisation of house building supervision would help home more of us. As it’s turned out, privatisation has sometimes turned house building into thoughtless consumption and responsibility buck-passing.

It’s become a sector in which the interests of financiers, insurers, developers and corporates dominate. These players have access to government. Their problems are solved for them by lobbying and legislation. Entire new “compliance” industries spring up to meet the demands of the legislation. Never mind the cost, just pass it on.

Owner builders now have to pay for special insurance to sell their homes. Owner builders have to document the use of a second-hand stainless-steel laundry sink.  Owner builders have to……etc, etc. Owner builders are being actively discouraged by a maze of regulation that has been set up to benefit special interests in the building sector

All of us must urgently reduce, re-use and recycle to have a chance of decent living standards everywhere, but our policy dominating home-building related industries, just wants us to get on with buying more new stuff, signing more contracts, knocking out more carbon dioxide and knocking down more older homes for landfill. Facilitating more owner building must be part of solving our housing affordability crisis.

It may also challenge the mindsets of some market fundamentalists that the homes of families are simply consumer products that double as capital returning investment vehicles.

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