Latest / The Good Builder Podcast / The Daily Dose #311 | Fewer Homes, More Money: Inside the Top 100 Queensland Builders Report
Transcript
- Az (00:00) Alright, so we got a new report out on Friday, which is the top 100 Queensland Builders. But don't let the name fool you. It's a bit of a different report. And I know what a lot of you guys and girls are gonna do out there. You're gonna grab the report, you're gonna scroll past the first 30 pages, and you're gonna look if you beat the bloke down the road because you either like them or hate them. But before you do that. Today I'm gonna go over some of the other stuff that we have in the report. That's not just a ranking, So you know how to use a report, what other value we've got in there. And to tell you the honest truth, it's a pretty cool report and it's much larger than just a list. So welcome to the Good Builder Podcast we hope you're enjoying your Monday. Let's get into it. All right, so I'm gonna talk about the top one hundred report that we dropped on Friday. We'll put the link below in the podcast, The difference between the report that we just dropped and a lot of the other ones that are dropped out there is ours is the official QBCC data. It does not miss a builder. We do not have a builder that's missed in top one hundred. It gives you a clear view of who is in the detached home market. we've grouped the franchise group so you can see who's the biggest franchise. You can have a look at all of that stuff, which is really cool and see the actual results. But it's more than just that. And that's what I wanted to talk about today. It's not just a league table, it's an intelligence report. And that's what we always try and deliver here at the Good Builder. We try and deliver value, how to actually use it, the read on the market, what's happening out there. So there's a few little things I'm going to go through today. And the first thing I'll go through is just summing up the year that's been for the top 100. And To sum it up in a pretty easy line, maybe four words: fewer homes, more money. Queensland's hundred biggest builders actually wrote fewer new home contracts this year than last. The builds went backwards about 6%, yet the dollar value went up. Total contract value was up about 5% to $1.33 billion in total contract value. So But if you actually sit with that for a sec, fewer jobs, more dollars, it's not a busier market, it's a dearer one. And this is what we bring through in the report, and we break out the contract values and talk about where the increase actually went. Now it's pretty interesting because the first thing I thought when I saw it was it was the cost of materials. Everything got more expensive to build, materials, labor, all the usual suspects. But it's actually not what the data says. Input costs over the same window of that financial year went up about two and a half to four percent. But the average contract went up eleven and a half percent. So costs went up a bit, prices went up even more, and roughly two-thirds of the increase isn't actually a cost being passed on. It's a bit of a mix, and it's actually what builders chose to build and what customers chose to buy. And there's a cool line in the report that I love and we put in there and it was like this. Think of a cafe. You've got the same coffee machine, the same prices on the board, but it sells fewer four dollar drip coffees and it sells more six dollar lattes. The average sale climbed, nobody touched the price, nobody touched the price of material, whatever went into that coffee, that's exactly what the Queensland builders did. Fewer cheap homes, more expensive ones. The under four hundred grand end of the market actually didn't dip. It freaking halved. And it went from about one in four homes to one in eight. And at the top end, seven fifty grand and above, that jumped forty five percent. The cheap house is quietly disappearing. And that's a bigger story than any single sort of ranking. So that is why I wanted to go over a few other things today and what you should look at in this report. The other cool thing that we put out in the report are the movers, and there are some wild swings in there. A big shout out to Ash from Glanville Holmes and his crew. You are up 483% year on year, Glenville Holmes, and Home Corp are up 40 off real scale, and that's not a fluke. So Home Corp did a fantastic job of quite a large base. And then you've got builders who look like they fell off a cliff. But the interesting thing is you think they're gone and y you look at their contract value. It's ballooned past three million. There aren't builders losing work. There's many of these project builders or ones that used to build smaller homes that have walked away from volume on purpose and now going to high end custom and it's not a collapse. It's probably more of a career change. And that is why we've written the report and analyzed it in this way. We're not just showing you volumes up and down, we're showing you what's actually happened. And just to kind of go on with that, there's a bit in the report that we talk about premiumization. Now there's a group that actually defines the year. Not loud ones, they're actually the quiet ones in the report. There's about twenty builders in there that did fewer builds than last year, but banked far more total value. Fewer jobs, but bigger jobs. It's happening inside individual builders and businesses one at a time, quite as anything, and it's the clearest signal of where this whole thing is heading in this detached market anyway. It's very, very interesting. Now what would be The purpose of dropping a top 100 report other than a glorified ranking. So what we tried to do was also overlay where the work is actually landing. So the report doesn't stop at just being a top 100 report. It starts being about the whole state. And what we did was we got the official approvals data, what's actually landing, the commencement data, and we had a look at that and we analyze it in the report. Statewide approvals are up 22%. The Gold Coaster loan was up 71%. And it sounds like a boom, but here's the catch. All of that surge or most of that surge is apartments, attached dwellings and detached houses, which is what we're talking about in the top 100 report, barely moved. So you look at all these reports and things out there that they're saying these approvals, but they're not breaking it down into what actually it means for your area and your patch of the market. And that's what we've done in this report. If you have a look at it. Where the land runs is Morton Bay, where the land releases actually more than doubled and low and and that's where the detached work is physically landing next. You won't get that just from a ladder, and that's why we put this sort of stuff in the report and why I wanted to talk about it today. So for people out there wondering who this report is actually for, if you're a builder and you want to find out where you sit, what the market's doing, who's moving on you and where the work's going next, this is for you. If you're a supplier, I know you used to love the top one hundreds. You know, this is where demand is concentrating. It shows the top 100 real builders, which regions are heating up, and it shows the average contract value and what's happening there. And as I said, the premialization, that could be very interesting for a lot of suppliers out there. And to be honest, anyone in Queensland that's interested in Resi, it is a pretty cool report, if I don't say so myself. And it is one of the most comprehensive out there. So you're probably waiting for the announcement of who is the top 10 or the top one we're gonna give away here. You'll have to get the report for the top 10. And it is Metricon who holds number one. Coming back from 1100 odd builds to under 900, but it's still top of the state. The top 10 alone do about 40% of the volume of the top 100. So it's really concentrated at the head, and there's a long tail of builders behind it. All the hundred builders are ranked in full, as I said, both years twenty-four, twenty-five, and FY twenty-six, and it's got value, contract value, everything. Go and check it out. So this is what I'm gonna leave you with. It's not a list of who's winning, it's a map of how the game changed for Queensland, what we're doing, how we're going. And the report tells you where it's all going to go next. If you're building in Queensland or you sell to people who do, this is the most honest picture of the market you'll get this year, I reckon. And we're going to be doing it quarterly to keep going. Before you go, a big thanks again to our partners at Australian Construction Data, which is the ranking data built off their site. We really appreciate it. They're really worth keeping an eye out for. And we'll drop the links below. And if you'd like to grab the report, you can head straight to QLD top100.com. Goodbuilder.com.au. Have a read. Tell us if you like it or not and what you'd like to see from us next. And we hope you loved it. And it gives some value to you and you're able to take some action from the report, which is what we want. All right. I reckon it'd be the best money ever spent. Like and subscribe, and I'll catch you next time on the Good Builder Podcast.