The packed room mirrored the packed schedule – it was a big one with lots to digest. Here’s our attempt to unpack the day and some of our key highlights.
Check out the full event photo gallery
After our opening thanks to Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, our residential lead, Matthew Cutler-Welsh kicked off the morning with a global update – as we work to lead and embed sustainable design and construction into the sector, other countries are surging ahead, including spending billions on ambitious energy efficiency initiatives and climate action. He closed with the reminder – the longer we wait to act, the more climate action is going to cost us.
Housing is key, but government action remains unclear.
The update from Minister of Building and Construction Chris Penk highlighted the government’s focus on freeing up land for development, improving infrastructure, providing incentives for communities and councils for growth. Importantly, it was great to hear the ministry reflect that we won’t solve key social and environment issues without dealing with housing.
Following this session, Antonia Reid gave an overview of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s priorities. Key for our community was the update on Building for Climate Change. Importantly Antonia Reid said emissions reduction and adaption are an important part of MBIE’s work.
If government sets the ambition, major transformation is possible.
Our international keynote, Rob Pannell talked us through the UK’s journey to transform the way they design and build houses starting way back in 2006, with a goal of zero carbon homes by 2016. As Rob said, "Each country has its own climate challenges – what works for the UK may not necessarily work for New Zealand, but the ambition will.”
As the managing director of the vehicle to drive this transformation – the Zero Carbon Hub, Rob says the goal was not just to ensure sustainable design and construction at a project level, but to provide industry wide leadership and create confidence, reduce risk and clear obstacles, and disseminate information. As well as outlining the key challenges and journey – he made our jobs easy with some key takeaways.
As he said - "Be bold, go for gold."
"I want to be able to look my daughter in the eye and say we have done our best and we have driven for change."
The day’s first panel discussions ‘High performance homes. Delivered’ did what it said on the tin – some awesome kōrero and some fantastic examples thanks to Nathan Edmondston, Sam Brown, Stephanie Spicer. Speaking to his 10 Homestar, Passive House certified home, Nathan spoke to the importance of calculating carbon and understanding our 1.5C ambitions, especially compared to those under the current Building Code.
Sam Brown’s SIPtris housing provided a great example of that – modular, cost effective, and readily available homes that deliver on design, efficiency and quality living. "So often we’ve lived in a poor living environment – we’re doing a disservice to clients wanting to invest their life savings in a home if it isn’t sustainable and liveable."
Stephanie Spicer of Oceania Healthcare was able to provide context from a large-scale developer perspective, and the importance of considering the long term.
"If we think it's going to be expensive now, the cost of inaction will be far greater. Also factoring in health and wellbeing."
Transparency is key.
Dyann Stewart raised the need for transparency in the supply chain and the pertinent point that Environmental Product Disclosures don’t always factor in the cost of manufacturing and overseas shipping. She implored policy makers to amend this and for construction professionals to request more information from their suppliers on the upfront carbon of their materials.
People, partnership and sustainability.
Hamilton City Council’s Sonia Baker and Mark Roberts shared their lessons from their Green Star Communities greenfield development project, Peacocke, which is setting a new standard for a more environmentally conscious, people-focused in Aotearoa. From the regeneration of 15ha of gully, 1.5km of streams, and the development of 30 new wetlands to preserve endangered bat and lizard life, to urban design that integrates Mātauranga Māori and provides walkable, public transport-oriented communities.
CEO of Ngāti Whātua Ōrakei (NWO) Trust, Lisa Davis inspired us all by sharing the innovative and people-centred plans of the iwi to provide homes for their whānau on the whenua.
She noted “we need a lot of heads in the room with different ideas, perspectives that contribute to different outcomes. The funding we established to banks for iwi was due to challenging the status quo. We need more funding, we need to focus on climate change resilience, but ultimately, we need to build for the people who live in homes.”
Collective agreement on standards and costs.
Leaders from government and industry highlighted the collective agreement that standardisation will be important to many of the cost issues the sector faces when it comes to high performance homes. With Iman Khajehzadeh sharing Kāinga Ora’s recent research on the importance of orientation in reducing uplift costs and Ankit Sharma, CEO of Registered Master Builders said that “our standards need to improve in New Zealand” and raised the concurrent issue for consumer education on the benefit of high-performance homes.
Sarah Elicker of Gracely furthered this point by adding that the way we communicate to the market could change, focusing on the positives of living in efficient, healthy homes. Chris Litten, of BRANZ sagely stated we need to see a large-scale shift to building high-performance homes we need to “design it right, build it right and operate right.”
Fall in love with BTR.
There’s so much we would pull from the energetic Built-to-rent panel. Kiwi Property’s Linda Trainer showed off the company’s new Resido BTR development at BTR complete with gym, co-working space, and a 1000m2 pavilion space. Their philosophy is to create connected community "People want a family and community... People want security, a place to put down roots." But stressed it’s important to not to consider BTR as social housing, but about giving people choice and a great lifestyle.
Roy Thompson of New Ground Capital showed BTR can deliver great, efficient housing for tenants, with BTR providing an incentive for owners to consider low-maintenance spaces that build community. "Any durability we can build in is good for residents and us as owners," he said. As Sam Stubbs of Simplicity challenged at the end of the panel - "Please folks fall in love with BTR."
Get on board
Shamubeel Eaqub rounded out the day with a definitive statement that “our regulator is not strong enough and efficient enough” and decried the building code, for continuing to enable “crap quality housing.”
To much applause, he made a resounding call for action to industry.
“Our conversations are still siloed, theoretical and political – the way forward is not to argue about solutions, it's to ask what can we do to get the politicians out of the way? When we come to consensus, we can make progress. We know how to do this. Our ask is not what should do? Our ask is - get on board, we are sold and we want you to support us.”
We also launched our brand new Homestar Design Guide which provides an overview of the concepts of building performance introduced in Homestar version 5, and is intended as a ‘how to’ guide for designers and professionals navigating the Homestar certification process.
We also celebrated our Homestar Champions; Alexander Reiche, Danidu Wijekoon, Ella Osborne, Joseph Lyth, Jo Woods, and Matt Wilson.
They are incredible sustainability professionals who have been using Homestar for over a decade and are key to developments under the latest version of the tool - Homestar v5. Ka rawe!
What an inspiring, jam-packed day of innovation and committment to a more sustainable Aotearoa, with better homes for all!
As Andrew said at the end of the day ‘Let's get this .... done!"