Australia cannot stick-frame its way out of its housing crisis — and the trades required to keep building the same way are running out. That is according to Kurt Schrammel, Managing Director of Vida Wood Australia, who told Wood Central the nation is “almost forced” to embrace large-scale prefabrication or risk falling critically short of the housing volumes it has committed to deliver.
Schrammel heads the Australian arm of Vida Wood, the largest sawmill group in Sweden by output, supplying framing timber into the Australian market from operations in southern and central Sweden across distribution centres in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth: “Australia is still too much dependent on building on site, (and using) stick framing,” he said, “and the degree of prefabrication is still not there where it should be.”
The consequence is not just inefficiency but an arithmetic impossibility — a construction system already straining under a chronic shortage of carpenters and site trades cannot absorb the volume of new dwellings the country needs without a fundamental change in how they are assembled. As it stands, more than 27,000 tradies exited the industry last year alone, leaving a shortfall of over 115,000 workers against the Albanese government’s housing targets. “Australia is almost forced, if it ever wants to reach its one million housing level, to fully embrace prefab,” Schrammel said.
Benchmarking Australia against the UK — a market where shared specifications and sizing allow Vida to serve both countries from the same production runs — Schrammel rated Australian trust and frame manufacturers and prefab housing companies at least on par with their British counterparts, and in some instances ahead. The gap, he argued, is not technical readiness but manufacturing scale and the pace at which the sector is prepared to industrialise its output.
On where to close that gap, his answer is unambiguous: Europe or Japan. “If you really want to learn about prefabrication, mass building, economies of scale in prefabrication, then it’s either Europe or Japan where you have to go,” he said — and Scandinavia, where Vida’s own prefabricated housing division, producing dwellings and student accommodation alongside its sawmilling operations, puts that knowledge within reach of visiting Australian delegations.
On the different types of engineered wood products, Schrammel said CLT is not a universal fix for Australia’s housing pipeline. He said prefabricated timber frame systems remain the most commercially competitive option for the single- and multi-family residential market that makes up the bulk of what Australia needs to build, with CLT better suited to urban, multi-storey applications where erection speed and lower emissions justify the premium. “It really depends on what you want to build, how you want to build it — and then you start picking the right products,” he said. “There is not such a single easy answer.”
Schramme’s comments come ahead of Wood Central’s UK–Sweden Study Tour confirmed for September, which will take in Vida’s Swedish sawmills and prefabricated housing operations as host sites, with Andrew Dunn, CEO of the Australian Timber Development Association, Perry Forsyte, Emeritus Professor at the School of Built Environment at the University of Technology Sydney, Professor Staffan Schartner, Adjunct Professor of Timber Architecture at Linnaeus University, and Wood Central Publisher Jason Ross joining as study guides for the tour.
- To learn more about the Wood Central Study Tour, including the updated itinerary, click here for more information.
