Australia’s frame-and-truss sector already produces 85 per cent of house frames using modern methods of construction — yet the country remains “almost forced” to embrace large-scale prefabrication or risk falling critically short of the housing volumes it has committed to build.
That is according to Kurt Schrammel, Managing Director of Vida Wood Australia, the Australian arm of Sweden’s largest sawmill group by output, who told Wood Central the country’s construction system is running out of the tradespeople it needs to keep building the same way. “Australia is almost forced, if it ever wants to reach its one million housing level, to fully embrace prefab,” he said.
Sweden is the obvious benchmark — but U.S. modular housing analyst Gary Fleisher argues the comparison flatters Sweden more than it helps Australia, because its 85 per cent factory-built housing share was not a policy decision but an industrial inevitability, earned across decades when chronic housing shortages demanded factory output and weather conditions made on-site construction economically irrational for months at a time. Last year, Building 4.0 CRC CEO Mathew Aitchison was equally direct, warning that whilst Australia has an immense amount to learn from Sweden, replication would be a mistake.
That is precisely what Wood Central’s 2026 UK–Sweden Study Tour is built around — not what Sweden does, but which elements of European industrialised construction can be adapted to Australian building standards. Australian Timber Development Association CEO Andrew Dunn, who will co-host the tour, said the “new and improved” itinerary comes as Australia grapples with shortages of detached, semi‑detached, mid‑rise, and high‑rise housing. “The tour will give engineers, architects, and construction professionals a unique understanding of how industrialised timber construction comes about,” he said.
Dunn saw the alternative logic firsthand on a previous European factory visit, where prefab lines were assembling fully finished apartment components at pace with no hand tools anywhere on the floor. “Amazingly, not a single Allen key was to be seen,” he told Wood Central — and unlike the flat-pack furniture the scene evokes, the apartments assembled at those facilities arrive on site pre-fitted and pre-sealed, stripping out the assembly-intensive trades that Australia’s construction system can no longer reliably source.
More than 27,000 tradies exited the Australian industry last year against a government-assessed shortfall of more than 115,000 workers, and Schrammel said the country’s stick-frame dependency converts that workforce deficit into a structural arithmetic problem. “Australia is still too much dependent on building on site, (and using) stick framing,” he told Wood Central, “and the degree of prefabrication is still not there where it should be.”
The tour opens in the United Kingdom — a market Schrammel said is a near-direct comparison for Australia, given shared timber specifications and sizing — before moving to Sweden for confirmed access to Vida Wood’s sawmills and prefabricated housing operations, Myresjö’s CAD-connected wall panel plant, a robotic apartment manufacturing facility, the Zerorobot facility, Södra’s integrated CLT line at Värö, and Derome’s house factory near Varberg, where, as Wood Central reported this week, crews are now completing two full floors of housing every working day.
Schrammel, whose company distributes Swedish framing timber through centres in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth, said Europe remains the only region where prefabrication is genuinely understood at a manufacturing scale. “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.
“We want to learn from the best overseas and create a model that is fit for purpose for Australia and our building standards,” Dunn said.
- To learn more about the study tour, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.
