Australia’s largest hardware chain has started selling flatpack backyard pods across the Tasman, with Bunnings New Zealand stocking two models from Melbourne start-up Elsewhere Pods, as a small-home market climbs since January’s consent shake-up. That is according to Karel Bietje, Elsewhere Pods’ New Zealand general manager of operations, who confirmed the launch this week, five months after the pods first reached Bunnings shelves in Australia.
“We are anticipating a similar response here in New Zealand,” Bietje said, with prices starting at just over NZ$31,000 and the larger pod measuring 4 metres by 2.4 metres. Packs are designed to be carried into most backyards, with assembly taking as little as two to four days.
Even the company avoids the granny flat label, with Bietje telling OneRoof that Elsewhere calls the products backyard studios, and the firm’s published specifications listing structural aluminium frames beneath insulated sandwich-panel walls and roofs. Bunnings’ Australian listing for the smaller 2.7 metre studio notes that the building is not to be used for habitable purposes.
Full dwellings are a different product under the reforms, with the 15 January rules allowing a standalone single-storey home of up to 70 square metres to be built without a building consent or a resource consent, provided the structure uses timber or lightweight steel framing under lightweight roof cladding. Licensed building practitioners must carry out or supervise the work, with councils issuing a project information memorandum before construction starts and Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk stressing the exemption applies “only to simple designs that meet the Building Code”.
New Zealand already builds its houses from timber, with BRANZ’s long-running New Dwellings Survey recording the material at nearly 90 per cent of wall framing over the decade to 2019, and steel, concrete masonry, and other systems sharing the rest.
Demand has moved fast since the rules took effect, with The Post reporting a small-home market taking off, OneRoof counting granny flat searches up 25 per cent in six months from a low base and 215 applications received by Auckland Council under the new pathway. Associate Finance Minister Shane Jones puts the savings at up to $5,650 in direct costs and 14 weeks of processing time for each build.
It comes as the Government moved in April to widen the pathway again, announcing that consent-exempt granny flats will be able to be manufactured off-site and that structural insulated panels carrying a CodeMark certificate will join the approved materials, with the changes expected by Order in Council in the third quarter.
Kitset housing has been on the retailer’s shelves before, with Bunnings first selling flat-pack homes in New Zealand under its own Clever Living brand in 2019, priced from $79,350 for a two-bedroom, 60-square-metre kitset.
“They provide an affordable way for customers to add functional space to their homes,” a Bunnings spokesperson said when the Elsewhere partnership launched in Australia in February. Showrooms are the next step for the pod maker, with Decarne reporting “huge interest” since the Australian launch and confirming talks with Bunnings on larger displays, following installations at Narre Warren in Victoria and Robina on the Gold Coast.
States across the Tasman are moving in the same direction, with Tasmania announcing in March that it would increase the allowable size of granny flats from 60 to 90 square metres, a dwelling type that Housing and Planning Minister Kerry Vincent said “represents low-hanging fruit” for medium-density housing.
Factory-built timber is where the New Zealand Government is spending its own money, committing $3.2 million over three years to an $8 million study into producing fully fitted mass timber modules onshore. Red Stag has already assembled the first four rooms under its VoMo system at Rotorua, and researchers across the Tasman are developing timber building systems for a secondary-dwelling market counting more than 10,500 builds a year in Australia.
The scale of the market sits in MBIE’s own modelling, which expects the consent-free pathway to add almost 13,000 dwellings over the next decade, every one of them, on the rules as written, built on timber or lightweight steel framing.
