Aggregates are important. But how important is clouded by a lack of quality data being collected. Based on current production figures and survey response rates, the actual amount of aggregates produced over the last 12 years might be 49% higher than reported. Read

To say that 2024 has been tough on both construction workers and employers is putting it mildly. In this article we use Stats NZ’s employment stocks and flows series to understand where construction workers typically come from, and where they head after construction. Read

Two surveys over the last week have shown rebounding business confidence, despite there being little evidence of an economic recovery any time soon, apart from the start of the easing cycle in interest rates. Along with the improvement in overall confidence, we delve into the figures for the buildin... Read

The commercial property market has always been more difficult to track and analyse than the housing market. Whereas the latter has a wealth of data available from REINZ, CoreLogic, and other sources, much of our non-residential work relies on collecting piecemeal data from several different commerci... Read

Updated data from Stats NZ shows that completion numbers for new dwellings have largely tracked as we had estimated over the last two years, pushing to a record high of 43,160 at the end of 2023. Completion numbers over the last six months have been a bit higher than we anticipated, which reflects t... Read

The annual total of new dwelling consents slipped to 36,453 in January 2024, down 29% from its May 2022 peak. The sharp drop in consents over the last two years probably overstates the downturn in residential construction activity, just as the strong and persistent growth... Read

At its most basic, our modelling and forecasting of residential consent numbers has two key influences: interest rates and population growth. Within the components of population growth, net migration is the biggest swing variable, while births and deaths tend to change much more slowly. However, ove... Read

Our latest forecasts predict an 8.0% decline in construction investment activity over the year to September 2024. Falls in activity are forecast to be broad-based, with a 14% decline in non-residential investment, a 7.7% drop in residential work, and a 2.6% dip in infrastructure activity. The declin... Read

Annual net migration reached a new record high of almost 129,000 people in the year to October, despite net departures of NZ citizens surpassing the previous biggest outflow that occurred in the wake of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The influx of migrants is creating renewed demand pressures in ... Read

Almost everyone we talk to in the construction industry at the moment wants to know how the residential build rate, or the number of completions, compares to new dwelling consent numbers. The heightened interest is understandable: no one believes that we’ve been building new homes at the same rate as we’ve been consenting them. Although the consent total peaked at 51,015pa in May last year, most industry players believe the build rate will only have got up to somewhere between 35,000 and 42,000pa, because the industry doesn’t have the capacity to deliver a greater volume of new homes. Read