Mike's Minute: We are housing snobs

A housing development for you. 

A housing development that once again shows how reality beats theory. 

Housing is a New Zealand obsession. We love housing and we long to own housing. 

It encroaches on immigration and whether too many people lead to higher prices. 

It encroaches on politics and the expectation as to what Governments do about housing and the prices of said housing. 

It involves social housing, emergency housing, KiwiSaver, incomes, the Reserve Bank, deposits and LVR's. It is all encompassing. 

In theory, if you could make building cheaper, we would be keen, wouldn’t we? Yes, I hear you say. 

So what happened to Clever Core? 

Clever Core is Fletcher's prefab house building factory. 

The factory is closing. 

Why, I hear you ask? Because, to quote Fletchers, "it had not worked". 

Demand was the issue because there wasn’t enough of it. 

If you had conducted a survey and asked, "could prefab housing help the so-called housing crisis in this country?" you would have got an overwhelming yes. 

Yet, did we follow our enthusiasm up with sales? Obviously not. 

Resistance from the building industry is another phrase Fletchers used. 

You see, as I have said many times, we are happy to moan about the cost of building, the cost of GIB, how cheap it is in Australia and how much a deck out back for the BBQ would be. But prefab? Oh, no thank you. 

Essentially, we are hosing snobs. It's sort of like with coffee - we moan about $6 for a flat white but pay it anyway. 

Not that there is anything wrong with that. If you want to pay anywhere between $10,000-35,000 per square metre that’s great. 

But what Clever Core reveals is we don’t actually want to save. Often, we don’t actually want solutions. 

What we want is what we have, and like, except at a better price. We want what we can't have. 

What we can have, we don’t want. 

Ask Fletchers. 

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