Report on the Getting Ready workshop 23 November

Four areas were identified as key for the sector to focus on over the next 100 days. Participants felt strongly that an offer from the community housing sector be made to help activate KiwiBuild.

The four areas are:

1)Central purchasing / procurement at scale:Agreement to utilize a procurement structure with a set of prefabrication builders, by utilizing a common plan book, with agreed pricing to drive up quality and keep costs low, while still offering ‘mass customisation’ within agreed parameters. Providers want to commit to supplying at least 15,000 homes over the 10 years, and want to make a bulk purchasing agreement available to any registered community housing provider. This means letting go of a small degree of modification in exchange for group benefits.

2)Treat the land differently: Recognize that holding land by community housing trusts, and not expecting a market return, is a good use when they deliver affordable rental and ownership options. The work involved is in looking at the structures, such as land trusts and covenants that ensure we retain affordability now and in the future.

3)Capital: Back a Housing Impact Fund that brings socially responsible private capital to work alongside government capital and bank debt, to activate the shared ownership and rent-to-buy opportunities.

4)Ending homelessness: was seen as the priority that would result from the three priorities above being actioned.

Leaders agreed that we would be able to make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring by delivering enough great quality affordable homes and building strong communities. This will happen as the community housing sector use our capital and treat land differently, activating prefabrication capacity to deliver.

Read the executive summary here:

Exec Summary Getting Ready Project EXTERNAL 27 November 2017 FINAL.pdf

And here is the press release that was sent out on 28 November about this:

PRESS RELEASE GETTING READY 29 November 2017 PDF[1].pdf