It's real! Building faster, cheaper, better apartments

Imagine if you could build apartments in half the time at 15 per cent less cost and a guarantee of no waterproofing, fire safety or structural defects.

‘Tell ’im he must be dreamin’,” say strata’s Darryl Kerrigans.  Apartment blocks take longer to build than ever, cost more, and fire and waterproofing are still endemic defects across the industry.

Enter Wayne Larson of PT Blink who is already constructing hundreds of new blocks with the promise that the process will be faster, less costly and with a much, much higher level of quality control.

How do they do it? It’s been described as a cross between Lego and Ikea flat pack furniture. 

Quite simply, at the same time as the steel frame is being constructed on-site, the floors, walls, bathrooms, windows and balconies are being manufactured in factories hundreds of kilometres away.

Okay, but doesn’t that mean identical looking chicken coops springing up all around the country?

Far from it, says Wayne. They take architect drawings, pull them apart and create the individual components, which then all come together, ready to occupy the spaces created on the steel frame.

Have a look at this video and it will make even more sense. But first, listen to this week's Flat Chat Wrap. Enjoy.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
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Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

Transcript

Jimmy

In this week's podcast, we're going to meet somebody who claims to be able to do what I think is the impossible.

Sue

What's that?

Jimmy

That is to build apartments in half the time with the apartments being 15% cheaper and virtually defects free.

Sue

That sounds fantastic.

Jimmy

Well, does it sound impossible to you?

Sue

It does a bit.

Jimmy

Yeah.

Sue

But let's see what he's got to say.

Jimmy

Right, so his name is Wayne Larson and he is with PT Blink, who build the steel frames of apartment blocks on site, but build the walls and floors and everything offsite in factories and then deliver them.

Sue

As a flat pack.

Jimmy

As a flat pack. They call it a combination of Lego and Ikea.

Sue

Sounds promising.

Jimmy

Okay. I'm Jimmy Thomson. I write about apartments for whoever will print the stuff and I edit the flatchat.com.au website.

Sue

And I'm Sue Williams and I write about property for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the AFR and Domain.

Jimmy

And this is the Flat Chat Wrap. 

So we're with Wayne Larson of PT Blink, who promises that they're going to build apartments faster, better and cheaper, which sounds like either one of those things would be good. Good morning, Wayne. How are you?

Wayne

Good morning. Good morning, Jimmy and Sue. Nice to be with you.

Jimmy

Basically, as a summary, you build the components of a... It has been houses and now apartments in your factory. I deliver them to the site and click them together.

It's been described as a combination of Lego and Ikea. How does it work? Yeah, Jimmy.

Wayne

So we have developed, I guess, a suite of technologies that enable us to, I guess, create a hybrid approach of moving the high complexity, high value, high risk processes offsite into manufacturing environments. And then couple that with traditional trades and onsite works for the type of things that have to happen onsite, like painting and carpets and that kind of thing. So we have a design process that allows us to effectively decompose a building design into its constituent parts, modularize those elements and then build it back up again as a kit of assemblies that are manufactured offsite.

Sue

How big are these pieces? Are they huge or are they delivered by crane or?

Wayne

Yeah, absolutely. So depending on the building elements, so we start with structure. We have our own IP around the superstructure of a multi-story building that we can break the building's structural form into four key elements being columns, blade walls for our lateral bracing elements, floor cassettes or trays, as we call them, and header beams.

But that allows us to design to any architecture with pieces that will fit on the back of a truck. So not huge pieces, they're all flat packed from, I guess, if we take the IKEA analogy, we flat pack them on the back of the truck and then they're lifted and placed in place onsite. But what it does, it means that we can do a lot of the work, the evaluating the labour component in the factory where it's covered, where you can work 24 hours and not impacted by the weather.

And then very, very quickly install those elements onsite.

Sue

The fact that you're assembling in a factory and building the parts in a factory, it means that it's much less likely to be delayed because of bad weather onsite. And also it means that it can be done much more perfectly. Isn't that right?

There's much less risk of defects.

Wayne

Yeah, that's right. And I mean, the entire process of manufacturing means that we're getting to full and detailed design very, very early in the process. So if you think of the way we traditionally build a building, an architect and a developer will come up with a design that goes through DA that might be halfway designed by the time it gets through DA.

Then by the time we get to the construction phase, it's mostly designed, but there's still changes that are happening through that process in a traditional DNC sense. But what we do is we send all of the materials, all of the people, all of the tools to the site where the building wants to stand and then convert those materials where the building wants to stand. So it's kind of doing all of that work in the way of where the building wants to be.

What we're able to do is take those processes and not only are we able to take them off the critical path, but we're able to do multiple things at the same time. So while we're building the structure in one factory, we're building the bathrooms in another factory, we're building the facades in another factory, and that's all happening at the same time. So you think of the analogy of swimming a hundred meters, you can either have four people swim 25 meters each at the same time, or you can have a four by 25 meter relay and one takes a quarter of the time So that's really what we're doing, breaking up that critical path, putting each typology in its own swim lane and doing those things in parallel, but being able to verify, check, measure all of those, particularly life safety, waterproof safety, fire safety tasks that are code compliant issues or high quality, high risk issues for strata managers, double check, triple check, and verify those things in the factory before they get anywhere near the building site.

Jimmy

Yeah, I take your point about builders changing things during the building, because when we lifted our carpet to put timber flooring down, we found painted on the floor a line that said cut here. And that was where they changed their mind about where the third bedroom was gonna go and turned it into a media room. It sounds like from what you're saying, the architect can still come to you and say, this is our design for this apartment block.

Can you build us these rooms offsite? Is that, and then the skeleton of the building goes in and then the click part comes together.

Wayne

Yeah, that's exactly right. So we, I guess, different to the traditional modular sense. So if you think of offsite manufacturing, it's a bit of a spectrum of how offsite manufacturing is implemented and one is a panelized kit of parts, which is the end of the spectrum that we're at all the way through to your full volumetric, picking up a box and stacking a box on top of each other, modular in a traditional sense approach.

We take the view that particularly here in Australia, we're such a distributed population that anytime you put something on the back of the truck, you have to maximize the amount of value on the back of that truck. So shipping air and shipping low value, high volume product is not an economical way to achieve the outcome that we're looking for, but also it restricts freedom as well. If you're constraining the rooms to that transport leg, then you're effectively constraining the architect and our intent is to give architects and engineers full design freedom.

So being able to adjust the dimensions of those four elements we talked to before, those floor cassettes, header beams, trays, being able to adjust those things by shape and size, it means that architects still have a lot of freedom to deliver the building and the aesthetic that they're looking for. On the facade front, putting a facade on a building with different materials, different aesthetic details, different design effects, still gives full architectural freedom from an external perspective, but it can all be manufactured offsite in a way that's highly controlled and able to be certified.

Sue

And can we talk about the timeframe? Say a timeframe for a normal, maybe 30 apartment building would take two and a half years to build perhaps, what would your timeframe be?

Wayne

So we have an example. The first building that we did was a 31 apartment building in Spring Hill in Queensland, just north of the city. It was a key worker accommodation building close to the hospital there.

The original program on that building was 18 and a half months. We had people moving in after eight and a half months. So about half the time is what we traditionally see when we are looking at a project with a developer.

And when it comes to things like cost, we call our company Blink for a reason and it's because Blink and it's done. It's all about time. We are solely focused on how we can get time back for builders and developers because that's the element of the building that waste that you can never get back once you've made it.

Sue

So does that mean the finished apartments will be cheaper to buyers as well?

Wayne

Yeah, we've got some really, really good examples of how the materials aren't any cheaper. Steel costs what steel costs, but because we're taking about half the time, you've got half of the interest of the project while you're carrying that project, half of the prelims generally, and you're getting to income way sooner as a developer. Whether it's a rental apartment building or it's a sale building, you're recycling your capital in half the time.

So the common impact, we see somewhere between five and 15% on most projects as a saving when you include all of those time-based variables. We're working on some very big projects with some reputable developers that we're seeing build-to-rent projects that are delivering tens of millions of dollars of added value to the developer that they wouldn't otherwise achieve because of that time-based equation.

Jimmy

The most common problems in buildings are waterproofing. And then that's specifically to the bathrooms, of course. And the other part, the issues which are both waterproofing and fire safety is where the bits of the walls and the ceiling all connect.

Now, I'm immediately being a suspicious person. I'm thinking, okay, there's a lot of connections in these buildings that you probably would get it in a normal building anyway, but what is your approach to those issues?

Wayne

So one of the really cool things, so that building that we talked to a second ago, Spring Hill, when you think of a traditional building, generally the accuracy of the build varies floor-to-floor by anywhere from 10 to 50 millimeters floor-to-floor. That building that we built was out of geometry by seven millimeters from the bottom front of the building to the top rear of the building. So super precise.

And we're able to do that because it's a steel structure at the start and we can actually adjust its geometry so we can straighten the building up and get it perfect, which is something you can't do traditionally. And what we say is, and I guess from a physics, going back to a pure engineering perspective is, anytime a building fails or something doesn't work is generally because of geometry. So if a floor is not straight, if a concrete floor is not straight, then it's gonna be very, very hard to get the facade to seal up against it for fireproofing or for water tightness, that kind of thing.

We can control the geometry. Secondly, generally we say, if you're going to do bathrooms, then do them in a factory. So make the bathrooms as pods or make the floor panels as prefabricated elements where you can control the waterproofing.

You can verify that the waterproof membrane has been put in properly. You can verify that the corner joints and connections have been done properly and do that in a way that isn't on the critical path. So to make a building in situ, to build a building in situ, generally it takes eight different trades people and they have to enter that bathroom about 65 times to create the bathroom.

You can think if you've got 65 different work processes going on across eight trades, there's so many opportunities for someone to get in someone else's way or do something out of sequence or be in a rush and get something done before the previous task was completed or completed properly or verified. So, again, take it off the critical path and do it properly in a factory where you can measure the depthness and performance of the waterproofing membranes, measure how high up the wall they go, measure that the corner details have been done properly, all of those things.

Sue

You've done a number of buildings now, I think.

Wayne

Yeah, we've done several buildings now and we've got a very big pipeline of work that we're working through at the moment. We're working with about 130 different developers across projects up and down the East Coast. And you're quite right.

We have a real challenge at the moment where, and there's lots of talk about productivity and how we're not building enough and that kind of thing. We sort of take the view that it's not taking us any longer to drive a nail than it did 100 years ago, but we've overlaid the way that we build things with so much more process regulation, not all, but generally it's for the right purpose, keep people safe, keep quality standards up, but it slows down the entire process or it adds more cost into the entire process. If we can take high risk, high value, high complexity processes and do those in a factory, we can then liberate our traditional trades guys to do the work that they have to do on site.

There's so many tasks that can be done in a factory that don't need to be done on site, but there's a lot of tasks that have to be done on site by those trades guys. So if we can take the work that we can do off their shoulders and put that in a factory and let them carry on doing the work that we can do today, we can use that latent capacity of manufacturing to bolster the output. Today, our estimates are we've got 240,000 homes per year we need just to meet the National Housing Accord.

We'd say there's probably close to another million homes that we need to combat the social affordable housing crisis that we have. So high risk work and crisis accommodation plus social housing. Then there's probably another two or 300,000 homes a year, actually more than probably 40 or 50,000 homes a year that fall into the knockdown rebuild market.

People that are wanting to knock over their house and start again. That's not adding new stock, that's replacing existing, but it's still using construction capacity. So there's somewhere between probably three and 400,000 homes per year that we need to build.

And today we're building about 180, 170,000 homes. So we're way, way off the mark. And that is in the context of one, a growing population.

So demand is not going anywhere fast. It's only going to keep growing and a declining construction industry. We've got more people leave construction than enter construction for a whole host of reasons.

So we need to do something different. And we think that by taking a hybrid approach where we're manufacturing things that we can manufacture and then leaving the trades guys to do the work that they have to do on site will get the best of both worlds.

Jimmy

Great. Just one thing about apartment living and getting back to basics, what people find quite challenging is noise transmission between apartments. And you and I probably both know you better than I that the basic building codes don't really address adequately what the social requirement is these days when we live in a much noisier environment.

How quiet are your buildings?

Wayne

So they can be as quiet as we like. We start with code. So obviously code is the minimum standards, but often where we see noise transmission either from outside coming in, a high performance glazing system, a high performance facade system gives two opportunities.

One is improve the quietness inside, but also improve the comfort and the livability. If we spend that little bit extra money and increase the performance of the facade system, the amount of energy that's consumed, the amount of mould that's created inside apartments, the amount of noise that gets into apartments can be alleviated through good facade design and performance, getting that performance right. Secondly, obviously livability around noise and also life safety around fire is critical.

And we talked a little bit about interfaces of products before, and that's really where that becomes critical. So making sure that internal walls are sealed properly against the fees and floors, against facades to make sure that fire and smoke transmission is not possible, to make sure that noise transmission is alleviated as good as possible. It all comes down to design and then manufacturing that design and controlling that design.

Jimmy

There's no fear. I mean, people who don't live in apartments say, oh, look, they all look the same. You know, they're chicken coops.

Is there any danger with your prefabricating offsite that that might happen, that people will be able to drive down the street and go, oh, there's a PT Blink building there?

Wayne

No, it's funny. So we still take people through that building in Spring Hill today. And there is only one spot in the building which is a service corridor, a service cabinet where a fire hose reel is that you can actually see that it was built any differently to a traditional building.

You just can't tell. And the selection of materials, the selection of design aesthetics on the facades can give the architect whatever freedom they like. Some of the buildings that we're working on at the moment vary from very, very high end multimillion dollar apartments in coastal, on the beachfront, all the way through to key worker accommodation in and around hospitals.

And the selection of materials and what products go to that building is what drives the design outcomes. So we liken it to a little bit to how you build a car. So you think of, if you ever get time, have a look at the Volkswagen Wolfsburg assembly plant.

And there's lots of videos on YouTube, but when you watch that production line going, you'll have a chassis, which our superstructures, we call it a chassis. A chassis going down the production line, but then one car is an Audi, the next car is a Volkswagen, the one after that is a Porsche, and then following that is a Skoda, but they're all using the same chassis. So it's just a different kit of parts being applied to that chassis that gives you the architects or the designers freedom to design the building or the car that they want.

Jimmy

So the next time I'm driving my Volkswagen, I can tell- You can say you've really driven a Porsche.

Wayne

Yeah, that's right.

Jimmy

That's terrific. Stu, do you have any more questions?

Sue

No, that's fantastic. It was a really, really good explanation of everything. I can't believe anybody uses traditional building methods anymore.

Wayne

No, they won't after this. I think the last thing I'd like to say is that we don't manufacture any of this ourself. So what we do is we license this to existing manufacturers.

So one of the real challenges with offsite manufacturing is that it's hugely capital intensive. And we've seen these examples all over the world of modular factories going to the wall. And it's generally because they've got to deploy massive amounts of capital to get the factory up and operational.

And then they have to have a very consistent and very deep pipeline of work to cover that overhead. What we do is we go to existing manufacturers that already have capital deployed, already have capacity, and move them up the value chain. And what we're creating is an ecosystem of offsite manufacturers that already exist today.

We've got about 350 manufacturers here in Australia that we're already working with, moving them up the value chain, but then also getting them to collaborate with one another. So electrical guys now collaborating with walling system guys to get more work done offsite. So it's really, for us, it's an exciting thing to be able to tap into the knowledge that is manufacturing in this country and create manufacturing jobs.

We believe that from our numbers, there's about one and a half new manufacturing jobs created for every department that we deliver to. If we deliver 30,000 apartments, that's 45,000 new manufacturing jobs that we can create for the country. It's all local.

Jimmy

Okay, well, thank you very much for your time. And that was really interesting. The time has flown by, actually, and very informative and very encouraging.

Wayne, all the best. And I'm sure we'll be talking to you again soon.

Sue

Thank you.

Jimmy

Wayne, Sue, thanks so much for your time and lovely to talk to you.

Sue

Great, thanks. Bye.

Jimmy

Bye-bye. That was interesting.

Sue

It really was, wasn't it?

Jimmy

I've had a look at a little video, which will be, the link will be in the show notes. And it really is, I mean, it just makes so much sense that they would build the stuff in a quality controlled environment and then take it to the site where the steel frame of the building has been built. And as he said, you know, they can work within millimetres to adjust so that there are no gaps for fire or noise or stuff like that.

Sue

It makes perfect sense, doesn't it, really?

Jimmy

Absolutely. And I remember that conference we were at in Queensland where there was a guy talking about, showing video of a plasterboard for walls sitting outside in the rain.

Sue

In a building, on a building site, waiting for them to come in and put them in.

Jimmy

And put them up. And as he said, the mould is already growing in the building before it's even been built.

Sue

So it's going to create huge problems when it actually ends up on the walls.

Jimmy

So yeah, it's really hopeful. It's nice to come up with a nice, positive story.

Sue

Absolutely, yeah, fantastic.

Jimmy

All right, thank you very much, Sue. Thanks for coming in and chatting and being part of that podcast, that recording. And thank you all for listening.

We'll talk to you again soon.

Sue

Bye.

Jimmy

Bye. Thanks for listening to the Flat Chat Wrap podcast. You'll find links to the stories and other references on our website, flatchat.com.au. And if you haven't already done so, you can subscribe to this podcast completely free on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcatcher. Just search for Flat Chat Wrap with a W, click on subscribe, and you'll get this podcast every week without even trying. Thanks again. Talk to you again next week.

Bye.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.