Sick of Building 'Just Good Enough' Homes? Leave A Lasting Legacy. | Ep143

I discovered that by focusing in on energy-efficient homes, I was gonna be able to add more value and know that what I left behind as a builder is a whole bunch of homes that are gonna well and truly outlast me. Within the industry, I think that we're already starting to see more builders coming and looking at the way that we're building now and going, yeah, I wanna do that. I think that that is great homeowners, and it's why I have the other business where we're providing help and support to the builders that want to do that. And one of the reasons that I do that is because the other thing that will start to occur is builders that will—

Welcome to today's episode featuring Jackson Digney, founder and director of Enduro Builders, a South Australian company specializing in high-performance, healthy home construction. In this conversation, Jackson shares his passionate mission to improve housing standards and build healthier, more comfortable homes. We explore the science behind energy-efficient design, his unique client-focused approach, and how his background in marine construction shaped his methodical building practices. From innovative materials to future construction technologies, Jackson offers valuable insights into why building performance matters and how Enduro Builders is helping shape the future of sustainable construction in Australia. Let's dive in.

Improving the quality and health of the housing stock in South Australia is the whole, like, why behind Indroo. The reason that I'm interested in it is that there's— it's really easy to just build anything.

Yeah.

Like, you can, you can build anything to any level, but we have a growing list of homes that are not healthy for their occupants. And as I started to get into the construction industry, I did a lot of repair and maintenance work. And so you see a lot of the fallout of not doing things properly. And my background in the marine industry kind of meant that, like, in the marine industry, if you don't do things properly, people, people can find themselves in a lot of trouble.

Yeah.

So, um, I suppose that I've always had this thing of like, well, if we're going to do it, we might as well do it to the best that we possibly can. And health and comfort just became something that flowed from me learning about energy-efficient homes.

Mm-hmm.

And that flowed from going, well, we might as well be building homes that aren't drafty and aren't cold in winter and hot in summer. And so one of the things that I find goes on a lot is that people get very focused on energy efficiency. And the reality of building energy-efficient homes is that they wind up as comfortable, healthy homes. Because to make them actually perform as an energy-efficient home, they have to be comfortable and healthy. And it's—

So you find it better to focus on the one than as the fruit of the other rather than—

Exactly. Like, if you build a comfortable, healthy home, it winds up being energy-efficient on its own because the things that you have to get right to make it comfortable and healthy also mean that it doesn't need much energy for heating and cooling. To me, That'll just, it just makes sense. And every time I explain it to a homeowner, they're like, yeah, that makes sense. I don't know why you would, why you would do it any other way. Because the, what goes on in the long run is that if you build something just to minimum code, or you build something without considering those comfort and health needs, you can wind up building a house that then has mould problems, or it's cold in the winter, or it's hot in the summer. And then you go, well, I spent $700,000 or $800,000 or $1 million building a house that is uncomfortable and I could have spent $1.1 million and got a house that was really comfortable. And then a lot of people probably look back and go, man, if I was given that choice, I would have spent the extra money to not wake up in a cold house every morning in winter. Yeah.

Was there an aha moment to go, you know what, we want to go more sustainable practice, more Passive House, more energy efficient, high performance, or was that a slow evolution?

When I started the business, I knew I wanted to do energy efficient homes because just because of my prior experience with working, doing renovation and addition work, and then working as a project manager for a commercial builder where we did a pretty wide variety of stuff, but we did— there was a lot of maintenance and repair work in there. So, I saw a lot of just slap it together and send them a bill and keep going. And I didn't stay doing that because there was no, there was no kind of soul in it. It was just making money and getting things done.

Yeah.

And yes, you know, you were, you could say that you were adding value, but I discovered that, you know, by focusing in on energy-efficient homes, I was gonna be able to add more value. and know that what I left behind as a builder is a whole bunch of homes that are going to well and truly outlast me.

Yeah.

And, and their current owners and provide safe, healthy, comfortable living environments for generations. And it wasn't until I started to really get into Passive House that I actually understood, like, Passive House Is, or certified Passive House, is primarily a comfort and health standard, and they use energy performance for the metrics because comfort and health are very difficult to boil down to a number, whereas energy performance can be boiled to a number very quickly. So, and you're a numbers KPI kind of guy, so The numbers have helped me keep going, staying in logic, not going, it's all a big disaster. We then had a look at, well, what if we use— we're going to have a solar system on the house and there's a tiny little air conditioner. Can that meet all of those cooling demands without the shading? And the answer was yes, it can. And we're still putting more power into the grid than we're using.

Oh, wow.

So that meant that we were like, oh, okay, well, we can get the house to meet the cooling demands without overheating, and we don't have to spend the $28,000 to $35,000 on a retractable shade because it had to be retractable because if you made it permanent, then the heating demand in winter went way up. And in winter, you're not getting much solar gain from your solar system because it's cloudy.

Well, I'm keen for you to take me Through elements of this house. Simply, for me and others watching this that where Passive House is still pretty new, I'll admit it is. Obviously I've heard it a lot and I know you guys specialise in it, but what, if you could boil it down, that makes a Passive House a Passive House?

There's 5 pillars to a Passive House, and achieving certain performance criteria in those 5 pillars is what makes Passive House a Passive House. So the first one is having a high-performance thermal envelope that's complete. So what that means is having the insulation all the way around the external walls, ceiling, and the floor, and that being all joined together so that there's no spots where hot and cold can, can transfer through. The second one is high-performance glazing. So that is double or triple glazed windows, depending on the climate that you're in, with thermally broken Frames, which also helps you achieve the third pillar, which is thermal bridge-free construction. And thermal bridges are essentially where the temperature from outside can come in. And the best example that most people immediately connect with is bathrooms with aluminium windows in winter, where they get condensation on the inside of the window. And that is obviously sped up a lot because bathrooms are wetter areas.

Yeah.

But people who have got particularly bad performing houses will also connect with mould on the windowsills in their bedrooms. And that happens for the exact same reason. You've got cold outside, warm inside, and that results in a thermal bridge through the aluminium window. The 4th pillar is mechanical heat recovery ventilation, which is about having constant mechanical ventilation, bringing fresh air in, taking stale air out, and filtering it on the way way through.

Okay.

And recovering the heat from that air. So during winter, those units will suck in, you know, 2 or 3 degree air from outside, and the 20 degree air from inside actually warms up the, the outside air as it comes through the unit.

Yeah.

So that it goes into the, into the building at sort of 19.5, 19 degrees, and then you only have to warm it up a little bit. And one of the reasons that that works really well is because of 5th pillar, which is airtightness. So airtightness is— there's a measurement of 0.6 air changes, which I'll explain in a minute. But the, um, that what airtightness does is it makes all those previous numbers work.

Okay, because as in like if I close the door, air can't really get out?

Exactly. Like if you, if you live in a drafty house, then Any— you could, like, one way I explain it to people is to say you could put the most expensive insulation, the most expensive windows and doors with the highest performance numbers you can find, but if you then leave a hole behind your oven where air can get in and out, and you put on a fancy front door that doesn't have door seals, Yeah. then all of that other work is a complete waste of money because all of the energy is Like the heat in the house or the cool in the house is just going to leak out through those bits. So what airtightness does is prevents that.

And so Passive House has nothing really to do with the size of the house or anything like that?

Yep, there's one, one tricky thing. So at the, at one end of the scale, there are commercial buildings all over the world. There's a certified Passive House aquatic center, and, and there's many certified Passive House apartment So you— there's like one end of it, and then anything smaller is possible. One thing that gets really interesting as you get down to smaller houses is the maths starts to get a bit trickier because you've got less envelope area to spread your airtightness across. And so it can be a bit harder with smaller homes to achieve the airtightness outcome.

Got it.

That's a physical limitation. But yeah, there's been plenty of like tiny homes and things like that where they've had a crack.

So actually, I spoke to a guy the other day who was having a crack with a Passive House architect to do a Passive House tiny house, but he's like, it's pretty much Passive House, but for some little element we can't get the sign-off on it.

Most likely, yeah, tightness. Yeah, yeah. And the other one, the other technical one might be because it can be moved Because a big portion of Passive House assessment is the shading.

Okay.

So like the building to the north of us— You're parking like that, it's Passive House time. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, okay. Maybe let's start with the wall because that is definitely a big feature when you come in here.

Yep.

It stands out.

What is that?

Because that's not paint. For those guys watching the video version, that is You taught me rammed earth.

Rammed earth, yeah.

What is rammed earth?

So rammed earth would be called a thermal regulator.

Okay.

So rammed earth is one type of thermal mass. Lots of people think of thermal mass and they think bricks and sometimes concrete. Rammed earth is at the regulator end of the scale for thermal mass. The other end of the scale is, is a thermal battery.

Okay.

So rammed earth's a regulator because you can kind of see that it has a kind of porous surface, and that porosity goes all the way through the depth of the rammed earth. What that means is that as you put energy in to try to heat it up or cool it down, that energy can't dissipate through the rammed earth really quickly because of all the little air gaps, and That means that it takes a lot of energy for a really long time to actually warm it up. It becomes a regulator. The reason that we did it the way we did it here is like it's in the void. So it means that you have, when you come in, you can look up and you see this big pool around it. It is cool. So for one of the other reasons that it's in this void is that this is where all the vertical air movement is going to occur in the house because you've got this big open space from top to bottom, so it's the best place for a thermal regulator. It gives the benefit of, you know, you get maximum contact time between the air and the rammed earth, which gives you a really good opportunity to cool it down or warm it up.

What is this big box here?

So this, this is the mechanical heat recovery ventilation unit. So it's the 4th pillar Okay. Of Passive Houses. It runs 24/7. It's got a tiny little fan in it that is sucking air into the house from outside at the same time as it's sucking air out of all the wet areas, so bathroom and the kitchen and laundry.

So in all those places there are air vents?

Yeah, those 2 airflows are crossing by each other, and at the same time There's fresh air being pumped into all of the, like, I always call them the dry areas, bedrooms and living spaces. The exhaust air that has had the heat taken out of it is going back out to atmosphere.

Okay.

And it also dehumidifies because as one is cooled down, it gives off its moisture. So What that achieves is that you are getting CO2-laden air removed from the house along with any contaminants in the house.

Wow.

And you're bringing in air and it's being dried by the process of heat recovery and warmed up on a day like today, because even if you go to walk along the beach, you're still breathing air that's laden with all sorts of stuff.

Okay. Um, and so that's one of the reasons Why, when you talk about you're passionate about making things healthier, yeah, this would be a big component of—

Yeah, this is really healthy.

People are.

Yeah, and we're putting these in more and more of even the non-certified Passive Houses that we're building, where we're putting them into a lot. We have 3 sort of standards that we build to.

Yeah.

And, um, the high efficiency standard, which is the middle one, we're Pretty much 100% of those are getting centralized mechanical heat recovery ventilation, and owners are specifically going for that because of knowing they're going to have fresh, clean, filtered air. Yeah. And it was used as one of the, one of like many things to start really pushing building code changes.

Yeah.

Um, because yeah, Sweden has really well-built homes.

It's fascinating that this is now becoming a big thing, and that's something I know we're going to talk more about today. So there was a system in I lived overseas in Germany for a year.

Yep.

And a lot of the features was in the house that I was in there.

Yep.

But that home was built like 15, 20 years ago.

Yeah, these aren't new. These have been around for a long time.

But the technology of Passive House—

Has been around since the '80s.

Oh wow, okay. When did it come to Australia?

The first one in South Australia was over a decade ago. And this is the second one, and then the third, fourth, and fifth, and sixth, they're all being built by us.

Typically in building, variations come up because there is a bigger impact on many things, I gather, if a variation has come up in a Passive House. You get less of that, less variations, or there's more time emphasis put on planning?

There's, there is It's tricky because we do a lot of things very similarly for all of our homes as we do for Certified Passive House.

Okay.

So we still provide the same level of opportunity for clients to change their minds and to change things as they go. The difference with a Certified Passive House is that we, if it's something that has anything to do with the thermal envelope and any of those components that kind of interface between the inside and outside world, Or anything to do with appliances or electrical devices, we have to go through the PHPP again.

Okay.

And enter that change in and see whether the house is still a Passive House. So whether it's under all the requirements, and if it impacts it, then of course there's a discussion with the client about, yeah, we can do that, but your heating demand is going to go up, or your cooling demand is going to go up. So, you know, the house might be less comfortable in summer if you emit the shading, or if you decide not to put curtains on that window, or whatever the thing is, we're able to talk it through with them.

Okay.

And we then have to amend all of that documentation. So in the final set of stuff that we send to the Institute, we'll have a document in there saying this is all the stuff that was originally put in to say this is what we're building, and that you accept it as, yep, it's going to be a certified Passive House. There's, there's a few things that we've done with this design. The first one is our normal thing is to do 920 wide doors. So a standard size door is 820 or 820 millimeters.

Yeah.

A 920 wide door is just easier to get through if you have like a walker or you're on a wheelchair.

Okay.

One kind of falsehood that you hear a bit is people say, oh, you have to have 920 doors to get wheelchairs through. You can actually go straight through a door that's 820 wide in a wheelchair, but turning off a hallway is a lot harder.

Yeah.

So having 920 doors kind of helps us—

Right, okay.

Tick a lot of boxes, because even though it is a narrow hallway, the 920 door makes it easier. We've also designed the bathroom so that it, with the addition of some handrails and removing the shower screen, it can become a disabled bathroom. And originally it had no shower screen, and we had a bit of a— one of those crises that you have as a— as any homeowner would. Like, right at the end of the build, we found that we had lots of clients that wanted shower screens in their houses, so we decided we'll put one in this house so that people can see what they look like.

Yeah.

So yeah, that's the only thing you'd have to take out to make it a A fully disabled access bathroom.

And you've got a lift?

Yes, of course. Yeah, the lift is there. The lift is there because we've designed the house to suit an older demographic, but having a lift is important for mobility, and it's, it's also just practical in this house.

We just explored what makes a passive house truly comfortable and healthy. Now let's head back to the Enduro Builders To understand how they turn these concepts into reality for their clients, starting with that very first conversation.

Most of the ones that we talk to on the phone have usually come across us somewhere on the internet and then subsequently done a Google search to find us. The best ones are the ones that, you know, they say, oh, we've seen this on Facebook, or we've been following you for a really long time, which I always kind of extrapolate out to they've looked at the YouTube videos and they've watched a lot of what comes up on Facebook, and then they've, then they've done a Google search, and we do get the odd client that comes in who leads off with I've watched every video.

Have you noticed a difference in someone that has gone I came across you via Google search versus someone that says I've watched every video? I know I'm looking at the two extremes.

Yeah.

Versus someone who said I've watched every one of your videos.

Yeah.

Yeah. What is the difference that you notice there?

Trust. The trust is way higher. I mean, you also get the occasional. fan. You know, yesterday we went to a meeting with someone who I had actually forgotten that we had spoken with them ages ago. And at the end she's like, oh, can we have a selfie in front of the house? Because, you know, I'm like a massive fangirl. And that all goes back though to the people that have watched more of what we have.

Yes.

Have a lot more trust in what we say, whereas the people that just do a quick Google search, generally we find that they are much lower on information, on background information, and much lower on context about us and what we do and how we work and who we've worked with and what we've achieved for other people. So the amount of time spent Bringing them up to speed on that is a lot longer, I find.

That's a good point you raised there, that the time that you need to spend at the front end bringing someone up to speed, giving them context, educating them, because you've put the time in to provide an education video format ahead of time.

Yeah.

There's a large percentage of the people that are coming to you having consumed that, helps fast-track that relationship.

Yes, it's still slightly anecdotal, but certainly if you go to that first initial phone call that people book with us, They are, they start off on a much better footing because they're there to talk about their project, not so much to talk about, well, who are you as a builder and why should we even trust you?

Absolutely.

Yeah, that's all covered off.

Yeah.

It's more about we want to build a house and we like what you do and we like how you work and we like your process and then we're into You know, well, what do you wanna do?

What's that initial conversation like and who handles that initial conversation?

So the initial conversation goes for half an hour, predominantly over the phone. Sometimes we do them by Zoom and we're sort of slowly moving the model to doing them all via Zoom. And we have a really good process for generating the answers from the homeowners that help us to best understand what it is that they're trying to achieve.

Yeah.

And what's motivating them, because it's really—

What's an example? If I'm a client thinking of booking that call with you, what can I expect?

So we always open by asking you to just take a step back and give us a bit of an overview of where you're at and With life, with just building a home? Yeah, where you're at, where you're at with your current home and what it is that has you either, depending on what box they ticked, wanting to rebuild that house or build somewhere else or renovate. And just give us a bit of a, a bit of an overview of, you know, what you're hoping to achieve from your building ideas and from talking to us today. From there, The next thing is that if there are any bits that they, they didn't cover, then you can pick them up as slightly closed questions.

Yeah.

Because you've already asked the mother of all open-ended questions. Based on that, we will always say to them, we think for what you wanna do, that, you know, it's similar to a project we built in Iron Bank or Bridgewater or wherever it is. Because by the time we've listened and it gives you a chance to kind of look through the projects that we finished and gone, ah, that's pretty similar. And then you can say, well, that project cost this much and it included these things and your project wouldn't need this or it would need this extra or whatever it is to sort of give them some idea.

Mm-hmm.

And then you can then also add context about where that client came from budget-wise to where they ended up. And then point out that all of that occurred before they signed a building contract, not after. And that enables the client to give you some feedback on how that all feels.

Yeah.

Because usually what you've done is just made them aware of the gap between what they think it's going to cost and what it actually costs.

Yeah.

And so once we've explained that, we then tell them what it costs. And we don't dance around it, we just say we do all of that, For $299, and, um, that's pretty cheap. And we're going to send you a link. And so we get that a lot. Um, we've not put that price up.

Yeah, once you've explained to someone what all they're going to get, what the value is, what the value is, there's a few different things.

Okay, we— the order in which we tackle things. Okay, we, we get to a point where we do a concept plan Then we do the preliminary budget estimate from that concept plan. Sometimes there's changes to be made to the plan, sometimes there isn't, but the time between presenting the preliminary budget estimate and lodging for planning approval is as short as possible. And we lodge for planning approval, which gets us going on the thing that takes the longest amount of time. Then we start on selections. Because selections can then be done Without too much time pressure, 'cause we know that it's 3 months in council. That then enables us to keep clients engaged and interested and not feeling pressured, and get all the selections done and deal with the plan, little plan tweaks and the specification tweaks and get engineering started.

Yeah.

So that we are sort of arriving at a place of having the engineering ready and having final pricing sort of resolved when we get planning approval.

One thing you said there, keeping the client engaged and excited, that is a very, very important part. And it would be so easy, and I've seen this happen a lot, it would be so easy for you to take information from the client and then go away and start working on some stuff, all your pre-construction, and then you come back to them weeks later with an answer or indication of where things are going or something. However, there'd be so much lost opportunity. One, you could lose the opportunity with no client engagement, but you could also, they could lose their excitement. What do you do to control more of that?

I mean, one of the key things that we do is we always set a date for the next interaction. So all of our clients, if you called up any of the pre-contract ones and said, how's it going? What's happening next? They'll be like, oh, we're doing such and such. And we've got a meeting in Whatever, and it'll be a day and a time and a location.

Usually, what's the average or—

Like the rollover between meetings? It always depends, but it's usually not longer than a month as you go through the process. And if it winds up being longer than a month, that's always client-driven because they're busy or something comes up, which happens.

How do I know I'm not getting ripped off? How do I know that that's a worthwhile investment for what I'm getting?

Yeah, that's, that's always the trickiest bit because, um, I mean, what I can say is that I stand here and hear all the arguments about how to make something more economical.

Yeah.

And I hear the estimators on the phone with subbies Driving the price down.

Yeah.

And, you know, negotiating with subbies based on previous prices and saying like, this has gone up and it doesn't make any sense and it should really be this price based on what we charged on this other job. And so those— but all of those conversations, they all happen behind the front door of the office and the homeowner, you know, there's plenty of arguments that have happened in here.

Yeah.

About how to make something cheaper to build while still giving the client everything they've asked for.

And still making it a healthy, comfortable home.

And ticking all those boxes where, you know, the end of it I've gone, man, I really wish that they were here to see that. Because it is really difficult to go through every little detail of a cost because it's not like a shopping cart full of groceries. You can't just, or you often can't just take one thing out of a build without it impacting 3 or 4 other things. The bits about making sure that clients are getting value for money comes from the work that we do in the background to make sure that we're getting the best possible deal that we can on everything.

Yeah.

And the knowledge that all builders charge about the same or get charged about the same amount of money for most of the things that they buy. The difference to a homeowner is how organised the builder is when they get to the point of signing a building contract. And then of course, how well they understand that contract and deliver on it.

What does that look like for you? You walk through the prospective client at that stage through in person, they come in here and they walk through the agreement with you, or what is it?

Yeah, so the contracts are always, we send the contract about a month before Signing, so that they can see what's in it, and and it gives them plenty of time to ask questions. And or you know if they really want to go and get a legal opinion, you can't change it because it's a master builder's standard contract. But it gives them plenty of time to do those things, and then that way when we get to the point of like okay we're ready to sign it because we've scheduled in to start the work. They, they're all comfortable and everything, you know, everyone knows where everyone's at.

Yeah.

All of our presentations and all our communication is done in 3D. So we, when we present, when you come in for your design presentation, we have it up on the projector and, and we give you a full 3D walkthrough of your whole house. And it's like a rendered—

That'd be very important to me because I know for myself I struggle to interpret 2-dimensional working drawings.

We have the VR goggles and everyone sets up at the end here. The thing that got us onto VR was I was always keen on it. We started doing 3D for every single project, and we were finding that lots of clients were looking at the 3D on the wall and going, oh, the window's too small and the bedroom's too small. We're like, no, this is like a 5 by 5 bedroom. This is huge.

What do you think was the issue there? They just couldn't—

Just the way that it projects onto the screen. Like, looking at the outside of houses works really well, and looking at big open spaces like kitchen, living, dining seems to work really well. But when you go into a bedroom, for some reason you can see the walls on each side, and I don't, I don't know, it's a trick of the eye. Yeah. And the VR completely solved that problem.

Now, having gone through the process, your pre-construction process, why is it important for that process to be repeatable and consistent?

I want to make sure, like, a lot of builders grow, and the story that you hear is, oh yeah, they're really big now and they're not great to deal with. So I want to grow without losing any of the things that made us good when we were smaller.

Yeah.

Or when we were this size. So making sure that we have a process that is repeatable and is easy to understand, and then combining that with, you know, a big part of our process is our recruitment process.

Okay.

And we have some very specific things that we look for. The best way to boil it down is that we hire for character because we can teach skills. It is not the easy road. But it is definitely the best road for retaining people because you go out there and they all have a lot of very similar views on the world.

Yeah.

And they all have different takes on everything. They're all individuals, but they have a lot of commonality. And their character is such that They're focused on doing the best for clients, and they prioritise integrity over profits because sometimes in the short term that can be painful, but in the long term you always win.

From initial consultation to detailed planning, we've seen how Enduro Builders guides clients through the process. But how do these energy-efficient principles actually come together during construction? Let's visit an active build Talk us through the clients for this project.

So what was their, their vision, or how did you guys arrive at this?

They sought us out specifically for Passive House, and right from the very first interaction, it was, we're here to build a Passive House. Most of the other Passive Houses that we're building or we've built have all been pretty modern designs.

Okay.

Yeah, skillion roofs and the sort of, yeah, that really modern look.

Yeah. Did your design team enjoy that? Yeah, yeah.

And it presented some— there's some unique challenges because one of the things about this house is the homeowners wanted to use hempcrete. Okay. And hempcrete is really difficult for airtightness. So we've designed it into the house so that it basically features in the house on one side or the other. So The key thing there is that it becomes, it'll become like a feature that you see as you come down the hall.

Yeah.

That you can see where there's like the flat bits of plywood, that's going to have exposed rafters.

Okay.

It's kind of like a faux exposed rafter look. Um, and, and yeah, the hempcrete kind of gives you that like masonry-like finish. But yeah, it's a really unique masonry finish. So between all of those things, they, they, yeah, they, they obviously came to us because of the Passive House, but they also had done their research and knew that we were open to working with different building materials and open to working out the problems that come with that. And the other thing too is learning, learning about new materials with the building science knowledge that we have.

Yeah.

You're, you're a lot more rigorous as you go through, like, right, how is this going to work? Is it going to be safe? Is it going to be healthy? How do we make sure— is one of my, one of my big things is making sure that we always encourage homeowners away from things that we know are going to generate a lot of problems for them in the future. And so whenever we have homeowners who want things that we know are going to give them problems, we talk through it from the perspective of we know that this product or this choice can be problematic in the future for these reasons.

Okay.

And we just want you to avoid that pain and anguish.

Yeah. So then they're making a more informed decision.

Yeah, yeah. And if after all that they decide to go with it, we're still going to support them. Yeah, yeah. But at least they go in with their eyes open.

Yeah. One thing that we discussed at the office earlier was just obviously a lot of communication going on pre-construction.

Yep.

Again, dealing with that fear that some people have and helping a lot of our builders understand to get in the mind of a client and the fear of, okay, once you sign me up, do I still have access to you?

Yeah.

Am I gonna hear from you? Am I gonna be informed about what's going on? What if I change my mind on something? All that. Now, being here on a construction site, how much communication is being had with the client during all of this going on?

At the very basic level, the bare minimum is that we have the fortnightly site meeting with the clients. And during those fortnightly meetings, we go through what's happened the last 2 weeks, what's happening the next 2 weeks, and give them an opportunity to ask any questions. And if there's anything that we need clarity on, we ask those questions then. And that is backed up by the online project management system where they can see the schedule and they can see the photos that are getting taken every day on site and they can see all of the progress that's occurring even if they're not going to site. The basic thing is that the project schedule is the center point. You know, lots of builders have picked up on marketing the on-time, on-budget line and One of the things that is really important about that line is the on-time part, because usually most builders that you see go broke, they've got 10 or 15 jobs when they do normally 3 or 4 a year.

Okay.

And, and they've got a whole bunch of clients that are like, yeah, my job's been at a standstill for months. And what that says is there's no organisation. And the only way to easily do organization on building is with your project schedule. And the project schedule for us ties in with our subbies, so they get notifications so they know a month or more in advance of when we need them on site doing their thing.

Okay.

And what it is that we need them to do. And clients have access to that, so clients are ever wondering about what's coming up, in between us telling them about it every fortnight, they can look at the project schedule and they can see all the way through to the end. And things do change. Like, I've spoken to builders like, ah, project schedules are a waste of time because everything changes.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, you'd be amazed what doesn't change once you have a schedule and you book someone in a month in advance. But you also can't help the weather and you can't help something going wrong and you can't help the truck dropping the materials and not in the place that you marked out for them and all those little things. But the thing is that But having the schedule means that you've got the foundation really well covered and that gives you the time to deal with all the little things that don't quite work out. And if you have to adjust the schedule, then at least you know exactly what the impact is.

Yeah.

So, you're not left going, oh, that guy's delayed by a month, or we'll just, we'll see him in a month.

Yeah.

You can go to the schedule and go, well, actually that's That's gonna blow us out, so we need to find another contractor. Or we need to go back to that contractor and say, if you can't come this week like we told you about 3 or 4 months ago and reminded you every month since, then we'll have to get someone else to do it. And it's amazing how contractors suddenly free up and they're able to come when you remind them that, hey, it's not like we called you yesterday and said we need you today. We've been talking about this for ages.

Mm-hmm.

So it's, it's all, it's all around that, that schedule. Within the industry, I think that we're already starting to see more builders coming and looking at the way that we're building now and going, yeah, I want to do that. I think that that is great for homeowners, and it's why I have the other business where we're providing help and support to the builders that want to do that. And one of the reasons that I do that is because The other thing that will start to occur is builders that will try to emulate those types of building things, like making sure that you, you're building buildings that dry out and don't get, don't get wet by using proper building membranes. There'll be builders that will try to find the cheaper way to do that and get themselves into trouble, which will then generate a lot of bad press around Oh, building an energy-efficient home, you're going to have a moldy house. You don't want to do that.

I've had some interesting conversations lately with some people who decided not to go with you a few years ago.

Yeah.

And they've now recently reached out and you asked them, how's your house?

Yeah.

And they said it's still under construction.

Yeah.

And we're talking like 4 years.

Yeah.

Like, you should have been in your house a few years by now.

Yeah, yeah.

What, what happened there?

Basically, they went with a recommendation from a real estate agent without— and at that point hadn't got a price from that other builder. They just went with that builder because of the recommendation. I'm just remembering back, I think that was actually 2021. So, and it's a big house. Like, to us, it would be like a 14-month build, like the house at Woodford, that was a 14-month build. But those plans were done, they were done by an architect that I work with a bit. So, they were— they didn't need too much fixed up on them to be buildable. And they were approved for construction at the time.

Yeah.

So, there was no— nothing really stopping you from just getting selections done and going for it. So, there would be no reason why he shouldn't have started like mid-2022, maybe late 2022, and then 14 months on from that, it should be done. It's probably at about this stage, like they've— based on the photos that I saw last week.

Wow.

So, they don't quite— they're not quite up to putting plasterboard on yet. So, whereas like I said before, it's like April now. And in schedule, we're handing this over end of July. There's always a component of if you show someone something really complicated and ask them to give you a fixed price on it, you will often get a really inflated price. And so sometimes what we do when we're trying, when we're doing something new, is we take on the risk as the builder. So we work it through with the, with whatever trade it is.

Yeah.

We're like, how long do you think, like, if it all went well, How long do you reckon it'd take? And you've got to push and pull them a little bit to get a number.

Yeah.

You go, all right, well, let's, let's say that it didn't go perfectly. What would you do and how long would it take? And, and from that, we kind of, we go, all right, we're going to allow this much to do it. If it runs over, we'll, we'll wear it. And so then it, I'm sure heaps of builders would would listen to what I just said and go, are you nuts?

Yeah.

But the thing is that it's a very controlled risk, and it's more often than not with a regular subbie.

Yeah.

So we often share the load if we both manage to make an error. We've also had projects where we did that and we talked it through with the client and we said, so we've allowed this much and We can either do it as a provisional sum, which means you're up for any overrun, or we can just make it a fixed part. And if it runs under, then we're, you know, we're going to get a win. But if it's a fixed part, then the win is ours. And if you make it provisional, then it could go either way. You might get a credit, you might get a cost, and then we just let clients decide.