Stanley Construction – Auckland, NZ

This was the first meeting of the trip and it definitely set the stage for our Study Tour.  Gary was a wealth of information and a pretty neat guy originally from the UK.   Stanley Construction is an 87 year old company with four business units: Construction, Eco-Build, Joinery, and Modular.  Their goal is to do $10 million in each business unit.

Some of the problems that developed from 1983-2006 was the timber used to build with was untreated which created issues with beetles eating up the wood and secondly was “leaky building syndrome” in which the buildings wood rotted and thus the building either had to be refurbished or demolished depending on how bad it was.  As a matter of fact, he shared a PowerPoint presentation where he was completing a job for the Waiheke Island Resort for several of their buildings that had the leaky building syndrome.  Ironically we were staying at that resort.  He indicated this was estimated to be a 12-22 billion dollar problem for New Zealand.  Some other things resulted from this as well.  They set up a ‘licensed builder fractional” which basically accredits builders and the gladding bailout package which was to help developers/builder with the repairing their buildings from the leaky building syndrome whereby if they put in 25%, the nation would put in 25% and they would give a 50% interest free loan.   The Lawyers didn’t particular care for it and would rather sue.  

Gary showed us another PowerPoint presentation where they were re-building a ski lodge and catshed that had been burned by a disgruntled employee.  He was discussing how they were building offsite and would then have helicopters fly it to the site and attached the panels/modular units.  The smaller helicopter was $3000 hour and the larger helicopter was $12,000 hour.  Another thing they were able to do was drag buildings and building materials up the ski slopes at night.  Another interesting point shared was the building codes stops at 2000 meters. 

New Zealand created a tax for companies with the highest CO2 emissions and the first industry they went after was Timber.  Gary said that just before the tax went into effect, the timber industry cut as many trees as they could and for a time you would see yards and yards of stacked timber.  Graham Hart owns most of the forest areas and is said to be a multi-billionaire.

Finally, Gary is very involved in the NZ Green Building Council which was born out Australia’s GBC.   They went from 0-300 members is less than 1 year.  They have since commissioned University of Auckland to help with the rating tools for the NZGBC.