Whole-room CLT modules have started coming off the Southern Hemisphere’s first volumetric timber line, with Red Stag‘s VoMo system opening in Rotorua, holding 150 orders, and the Prime Minister naming schools, hospitals, and military facilities as the pipeline it could serve. That is according to reporting by the Rotorua Daily Post, which covered a Friday ribbon-cutting where the first four modules stood as the centre of attention on the Waipā Mill floor.
“I don’t want to send money offshore,” Christopher Luxon said of the steel and cement New Zealand imports for its buildings, telling guests the country has spent decades treating timber as a commodity instead of adding value through innovation.
From his ninth-floor Beehive office, Luxon watches a six-storey building rise in Red Stag product, the Museum Street block Parliament is building in the company’s glulam. He called it inspiring and asked why the country cannot do more of the same.
“To the untrained eye, you’ll see four boxes over there,” Marty Verry, Chief Executive of the Red Stag group, said of modules he told guests carry lower construction costs, fewer variations, less waste, and faster completion.
Verry claims that the Southern Hemisphere-first line builds complete room-sized modules from cross-laminated timber before trucking them to the site, a system built with German architects NKBAK and Austrian constructor Kaufmann Bausysteme and backed by MPI’s Primary Sector Growth Fund. Wood Central understands that orders already cover 150 modules over the next two years, with the line built to reach 800 a year and markets named across classroom blocks, apartments, townhouses, hotels, student accommodation, offices, and aged care.
“It is taking the trees that we grow well and providing a choice,” Todd McClay, the Forestry Minister and Rotorua MP, said of backing he called an easy decision, thanking Verry for giving nearly 500 locals job security through continued investment. Crown funding comes to NZ$3.2 million through the Primary Sector Growth Fund, with Red Stag adding $4.8 million to reach the $8 million programme over three years, and McClay putting the value of processing logs onshore at nearly seven times that amount.
“We don’t want to keep importing steel and concrete,” Mark Ross, Chief Executive of the Wood Processors and Manufacturers Association, said of an innovation he called stabilising, welcoming the Prime Minister’s statement that government construction needs more wood.
Supply security was the industry’s other theme, with Forest Owners Association Chief Executive Elizabeth Heeg saying domestic processing takes volatility out of the supply chain, leaving the country importing fewer materials.
It comes as the sector restated three policy changes on the day, pushing a wood design option on government projects, harvesting wood products, carbon recognition in the Emissions Trading Scheme, and embodied carbon reporting for larger buildings. A Cabinet Paper delivering the carbon scheme, the National and Act promised at the last election, is drafted and pending, according to Red Stag.
Verry has run this argument for two decades, telling a climate podcast in 2020 that a Wood First policy rejected by a previous government was essential to climate commitments and housing demand. The difference on Friday was the audience: the Prime Minister, inside his factory, saying the part about offshore money himself.
