Kāinga Ora normally takes 18 months put shovels in the ground on a new multi-unit development. A new project has so far cut that time down to two months.

When it comes to the speed at which the Government is building houses, nobody is happy.

Housing Minister Megan Woods told the Social Services and Community select committee this week that 1232 new public houses and 583 transitional houses would be built this year, an achievement she acknowledged “certainly is shy of what the original ‘statement of performance expectation’ target was”.

National MP Chris Bishop said subtracting the number of houses Kāinga Ora had built from the number that had been demolished, only 21 extra houses had been added to the public housing supply over the past year.

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“Have you had any conversations with the board or the executive team around speeding up the building of Kāinga Ora homes?,” Bishop asked.

Enter “Project Velocity”, a term which started appearing on PowerPoint slides and in official documents a couple of years ago.

Kāinga Ora construction and innovation general manager Patrick Dougherty has high hopes that the project will not only change how quickly the Government builds homes, but how fast the rest of the industry does too.

And he can point to some early successes. The project has already reduced the amount of time taken in the pre-construction phase for the pilot project in Christchurch, from 18 months under the old way to two months.

Project Velocity is a result of an analysis of how long different parts of the construction process take, and was prompted by the realisation that Kāinga Ora is doing something that has not been done before.

New Zealand has built large amounts of public housing in the past, but it hasn’t built brownfield developments before on a large scale, redeveloping land where houses already exist.

So Kāinga Ora looked at its own processes and found that even leaving out the resource consent process the pre-construction phase was taking nearly two years to complete.

The reason? Everybody was waiting on everybody else. In a multi-unit development 45 different specialists are involved and each spends a lot of time waiting on the other to complete their bit.

Further down the line this can cause problems around needing to rework plans that might suit an architect but not a drainlayer, for example.

Dougherty says this is not just how Kāinga Ora projects are run, but how most of the industry operates.

Project Velocity is about getting all these different parties working together to complete a project.

“We’re creating an integrated team approach where, really simply, we’re bringing them all into the room, and we’re saying, the project is the focus.”

This might seem like a straightforward thing to achieve, but AUT construction professor John Tookey says it is fraught with difficulty and a large part of it can actually come down to the quality of management, along with whether you can actually get everybody in the same room together.

“[Being] physically co-located is massively important and where this sort of technique has been primarily adopted is in the likes of aerospace design offices, the likes of Boeing for example,

“What they try and do is they'll have all of their teams working in a single office environment ... so you end up with a multidisciplinary, multi skilled team all working in the same space.”

Tookey says over the years the construction industry has become highly fragmented because the different skills involved have become highly specialised.

It is often not economically feasible for any one company to keep all of these specialised groupings in-house, so they often end up working separately on projects.

But he believes Kāinga Ora has the best shot at pulling something like Project Velocity off at scale, because the wider industry faces different demands to what Kāinga Ora does.

Since 2017 residential consents for government controlled residential projects, most of which will be Kāinga Ora homes, have made up between 4% and 6% of the total number of residential building consents issued in any given year.

Despite its small size, Kāinga Ora’s pipeline of development is likely to take on a greater significance now that the private sector is looking to wind back its investments and put projects on ice.

Dougherty says Kāinga Ora has 4700 homes under construction or under contract, and it has another 6000 homes in the pre-construction phase that are due to be delivered over the next two years.

Tookey says this pipeline will keep the construction industry on “life support” over the next few months, and years, as others cutback.

However, he says the reason Kāinga Ora is best-placed to do development at scale is because the demands on them are different to the demands private developers face.

Buyers of new builds want a large degree of customisation, reducing the ability to manufacture lots of housing quickly.

“When you’re looking at housing, the construction process is totally adaptable, totally bespoke,” Tookey says.

“Until such time as we impose controls to limit our flexibility in that regard, you’re not going to get these sorts of fast-tracking exercises taking place as a common way of doing business.”