Prefab impediments

The hurdles for prefab builds include:

• The need for a 10-year build guarantee (IIRC) by the prefabber, with associated insurance and backstopping costs
• BRANZ attitude to any new materials certification - many tests, several years, mucho pesos
• The existing Materials Cartel protection of 'their' patch - they can reasonably be assumed to throw various rocks on That path
• The limited number of actual Jobs (especially unionised), as factories tend to be highly automated and work around the clock - won't appeal to the blue-collars seeking work in 'em - or their puppet-masters
• And the land prices underneath are still foobarred by the brown-cardy set via Plans which limit supply, inject Time and thus Cost to development, and which change at glacial speed.

Just imagine the reaction of the current playaz to an announcement like This (thought experiment alert!)

"We are prefabricating a Hoosing Factory offshore. It will be highly automated, needing only a few top-flight technicians to keep it running. It will arrive onshore in October and will commence operations in December. The houses produced from this factory:

•  will use materials proven overseas but new to NZ, 
• will be manufactured to sub-millimetre tolerances, 
• will be built under cover,  
• will be assembled in 2-3 days on site by an experienced crew using battery-operated tools. 

The factory is expected to have a throughput of 20 houses per day, and will operate 20 hours per day for 360 days of the year.

• Maintenance crews will be flown in for a 5-day upgrade and maintenance window. 
• Unit costs for the houses thus produced are expected to be in the region of $800/square. 
• All houses will be serial-numbered and will come with a 20-year guarantee of weathertightness."

Ah, we can dream.....

That 'Free market' in housing

I think it's more likely though that the market will be left to its own devices

Wishful thinking - it's never been a free market: Let us count some of the ways it Ain't a market:

• Dopey zoneration policies by economically clueless TLA's which serve to foobar the price of the land under them Hooses
• A cosy Building Materials Duopoly, untrammelled by ComCom, hostile to new entrants and highly protective of their own cartelised patches
• Consents, and other regulation, subject to local brown-cardy-staffed monopolies which have yet to recognise that Time = Money so have complete freedom to inject Time and Modest Fees into every activity under their baleful purview
• A building industry composed of thousands of two-bit builders, clonking up houses in a manner which would not be unfamiliar to a 19th century carpenter, all vying for the same few high-end-of-market jobs, because that's where the munny is, leading to highly inelastic supply at t'other end
• A regional price floor slipped in under all house prices by economically clueless Gubmint schemes like Welcome Home Loans (criterion - can you Fog a Mirror?) which ensures house prices - new or old - are sticky on the downside

No doubt, common taters can think of more ways it ain't a real 'market'.....so 'it's own devices' has, shall we say, a very particular meaning.

It means, being left in the gentle claws of the Opolists, rent-seekers and ticket-clippers.

New Zealand - a chain of systempunkts

The sad fact is that NZ, as a long, thin, and increasingly poor country, is just chocka with what John Robb terms 'systempunkts' - points where a directed attack or natural causes can generate an effect wildly out of proportion to the original investment.

•     Kaikoura earthquake severed the single rail line North-South in the Mainland,
•     Xtra's Interwebs in the NI went west a few years back via a rat on a fiber optic on one loop, and a digger (them diggers should, perhaps, be Watched?) on the other
•     I've always reckoned that a handful of clapped-out Datsun 180's, 'stalled' on a few strategic Awkland on or off-ramps or the Newmarket overbridge, would gridlock the sorry show for a day or more
•     And let's not forget the weeks without power to Central Awkland a coupla decades back.

A leetle story about older infrastructure in a major Wellywood Gubmint building just before Y2K (remember that?):

The crew decided to test the resilience of the backup power systems in the building. Good call, because over three attempts, this is what they found each time they disconnected the external power via the Big Red Switch:

1.     The UPS behind the mainframe floor had never been deep-cycled. It failed after a few tens of seconds. New UPS ordered.
2.     Weeks later, feeling a bit smug, next disconnection. UPS works, genny fires up. Genny lasts about half an hour before one phase burns out completely. Turns out the building, as it was occupied, had all power wired to predominantly one of three possible phases. Mild panic sets in. Building wiring hastily re-jigged, New genny ordered
3.     Genny arrives. Whoops, won't fit in the basement space. Needs a hastily erected external shed. Panic turns from mild to extreme (mid-December 1999). But third time lucky, it all holds together when the Big Red Switch is thrown.

One building, in one city.