By Alysha Dew, Managing Director.
As recent news headlines have told us, Australia is in the grips of a housing shortage, but just how severe this shortage has become is quite striking. While the Australian Government1 has set a target of 1.2 million new homes to be built between 2024 and 2029, current figures have not painted an optimistic picture.
1 The Treasury, Australian Government. (n.d.). Delivering the National Housing Accord. Commonwealth of Australia. https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/housing/accord
In fact, the latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics2 indicated that just 28,677 new private sector houses were completed in the September 2024 quarter, as well as an additional 14,860 other resident dwellings.
2 Australian Bureau of Statistics. (September 2024). Building Activity, Australia, ABS Website, accessed 25 March 2025. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/building-and-construction/building-activity-australia/sep-2024
While Federal and State-level policies aim to address these shortages, there is much that can be done from an industry perspective. From a Project Manager’s viewpoint, innovation is crucial to enable sustainable growth alongside housing developers and builders.
Here are three key ways that construction industry innovation can help solve Australia’s housing crisis and deliver more houses, faster.
Smart work methods and systems
Integrating innovation throughout internal and onsite methods and systems is essential to boosting scalability and productivity.
The impact of smart internal infrastructure that supports best-practice work methods can simply not be overstated when it comes to housing delivery. At a company level and an industry level, technology-backed systems allow for increased volume with better consistency of product and service.
The more that developers, builders and contractors build smarter systems that help their people – and each other – to streamline build programs and costs, the greater the feasibility that new housing projects are delivered as and when needed.
At Maaken, our fully custom-designed tech systems are the backbone of our superior project management delivery and have continued to evolve over the past decade, in line with automation advancements, industry trends and to better integrate with our clients’ own systems.
Boosting skills and recruitment
Equal in importance to smarter systems, removing labour-based roadblocks is critical to solving Australia’s housing crisis.
Construction trades have consistently appeared on Australia’s skilled shortage lists in recent years, with the sector calling for skilled migration to help address a dwindling labour pool and rising costs.
Innovation also has a role to play here, to ensure that those backend systems are supported by workers and contractors with site-ready skills central to scaling up the rate and quality of housing delivery and affordability.
Investment in innovative recruiting, education and upskilling of workers will be key.
Material-driven efficiencies
Innovation is an interesting space when it comes to specialising in AAC, as the product itself already allows for fast, efficient, affordable, and sustainable residential walling and flooring applications. This significantly reduces construction time and cost per home compared with traditional materials.
The construction industry has embraced a range of innovative solutions, and we are constantly seeing advancements through the improvements of existing building materials and the introduction of new and interesting solutions such as bio-based composites like Hemp.
As materials continue to evolve so do the considerations around safety and installation methods. Emerging technologies are set to enhance material performance, making them safer, more efficient, and potentially more sustainable.
AAC itself has gained increasing mainstream recognition over the last decade, and Maaken is excited about the future of material-driven efficiencies. Working alongside our valued clients, we’re excited to discover and deliver all the latest innovations that will improve both quality and performance in construction.
