Sick of Building 'Just Good Enough' Homes? Leave A Lasting Legacy. | Ep143

I discovered that by focusing on energy efficient homes, I was going to be able to add more value and know that what I left behind as a builder is a whole bunch of homes that are going to well and truly outlast me. Within the industry, I think that we're already starting to see more builders coming and looking at the way that we're building now and going, "Yeah, I want to do that." I think that that is great for homeowners and it's why I have the other business where we're providing help and support to the builders that want to do that. And one of the reasons that I do that is because the other thing that will start to occur is builders that will. Welcome to today's episode, "Futuring Jackson Dicky", founder and director of Enduro Builders. The South Australian company is specialising in higher performance, healthy home construction. In this conversation, Jackson shares his passionate mission to improve housing standards and build healthier, more comfortable homes. We explore the signs behind energy efficient design, his unique client-focused approach, and how his background in marine construction shaped his methodical building practices. The idea of materials to future construction technologies, Jackson offers valuable insights into why building performance matters and how Enduro Builders is helping shape the future of sustainable construction in Australia. Let's dive in. The quality and health of the housing stock in South Australia is the whole like why behind Enduro. There isn't that. I'm interested in it is that there's. It's really easy to just build anything. Like you can build anything to any level. But we have a growing list of homes that are not healthy for their occupants. As I started to get into the construction industry, I did a lot of repair and maintenance work. You see a lot of the fallout of not doing things properly. My background in the marine industry kind of meant that in the marine industry, if you don't do things properly, people can find themselves in a lot of trouble. So I suppose that I've always had this thing of like, "Well, we're going to do it. We might as well do it to the best that we possibly can." And health and comfort just became something that flowed from me learning about energy efficient homes. And that flowed from going, "Well, we might as well be building homes that aren't drafty and aren't cold in winter and hot in summer." And so one of the things that I find goes on a lot is that people get very focused on energy efficiency. And the reality of building energy efficient homes is that they wind up as comfortable healthy homes because to make them actually perform as an energy efficient home, they have to be comfortable and healthy. And it's. You're not better to focus on the one than as the fruit of the other rather than. If you be able to comfortable healthy home, it winds up being energy efficient on its own. Because the things that you have to get right to make it comfortable and healthy also mean that it doesn't need much energy for heating and cooling. To me, that all just. it just makes sense. And every time I explain it to a homeowner, they're like, "Yeah, it makes sense. I don't know why you would do it any other way." Because the. what goes on in the long run is that if you build something just to minimum code or you build something without considering those confident health needs, you can wind up building a house that then has more problems or it's cold in the winter or it's hot in the summer. And then you go, "Well, I spent seven or eight hundred grand or a million dollars building a house that is uncomfortable." And then 1.1 million. And got a house that was really comfortable. And then a lot of people probably look back and go, "Now, if I was given that choice, I would have spent the extra money to not wake up in a cold house every morning and winter." Was there an a-a-harm moment to go, "You know what, we want to go more sustainable practice, more passive house, more energy efficient high performance." When I started the business, I knew I wanted to do energy efficient homes because just because of my prior experience with working, doing renovation and addition work and then working as a project manager for commercial builder where we did a pretty wide variety of stuff, but we did, there was a lot of maintenance and repair work in there. I saw a lot of just slap it together and send a rebuild and keep going and I didn't stay doing that because there was no kind of soul in it. It was just making money and getting things done. And yes, you could say that you were adding value, but I discovered that by focusing in on energy efficient homes, I was going to be able to add more value and know that what I left behind as a builder is a whole bunch of homes that are going to voluntarily outlast me and their current owners and provide safe, healthy, comfortable living environments for generations. And it wasn't until I started to really get into passive house that I actually understood, like passive house is certified passive house is primarily a comfort and health standard. And they use energy performance for the metrics because comfort and health are very difficult to boil down to a number, whereas energy performance can be boiled to a number very quickly. And your numbers can be like, I said the numbers have helped me keep going, staying in logic, not going to be disaster. So look at what if we use we're going to have a solar system on the house and there's a tiny little air conditioner, can that meet all of those cooling demands without the shading and the answer was yes, can. And we're still putting more power into the grid than we're using. So that meant that we were like, okay, well, we can get the house to meet the cooling demands without overheating and we don't have to spend the 20 to 35 grand on a retractable shade because that's very retractable because if you made it permanent, then the heating demand and winter went way up. And in winter, you're not getting much solar gain from your solar system because it's cloudy. So I mean for you to take me through elements of this house, simply for me and others watching this that we're pass a house is still pretty new. I'll admit it is obviously I've heard it a lot, I know I specialize in it, but what if you could boil it down, that makes a pass a pass a pass a pass. There's five pillars to a passive house and achieving certain performance criteria in those five pillars is what makes a passive house a passive house. So this one is having a high performance thermal and blow that's complete. So what that means is having the insulation all the way around the external walls, ceiling and the floor and that being all joined together so that there's no spots where hot and cold can can transfer through. The second one is high performance glazing. So that is double or triple glazed windows, depending on the climate that you're in. So that's a fairly broken frames, which also helps you achieve the third pillar, which is thermal bridge free construction and thermal bridges are essentially where the temperature from outside can come in. And the best example that most people immediately connect with is bathrooms with aluminium windows in winter where they get compensation on the inside of the window. And it's actually sped up a lot because bathrooms are wetter areas, but people who have got particularly bad performing houses will also connect with mold on the window seals in their bedrooms. And that happens for the exact same reason you got cold outside, warm inside and that results in a thermal bridge through the aluminium window. So that is mechanical head recovery ventilation, which is about having constant mechanical ventilation, bringing fresh air in, taking style out and filtering it on the way through and recovering the heat from that air. So during winter, those units will suck in you know two or three degree air from outside and the 20 degree air from inside actually warms up the outside air as it comes through the unit. And then you go into the building at sort of 19 and a half 19 degrees and then you only have to warm it up a little bit. And one of the reasons that that works really well is because of the fifth pillar, which is air tightness. So air tightness is there's a measurement of 0.6 air changes, which I'll explain in a minute, but the that what air tightness does is it makes all the previous numbers work. as you like if I close it all, yeah, kind of. really get out. Exactly. If you live in a drafty house, then one way to explain it to people is to say, you could put the most expensive insulation, the most expensive windows and doors with the highest performance numbers you can find. But if you then leave a hole behind your oven where air can get in and out and you put on a fancy front door that doesn't have door seals, then all of that other work is a complete waste of money because all of the energy is like the heat in the house, all the cool in the house is just going to leak out through those bits. So what air tightness does is prevents that. And so pacifouse has nothing really to do with the size of the house or anything like that. Yeah, there's one tricky thing. So at one end of the scale, there are commercial buildings all over the world. There's a certified pacifouse at a aquatic centre and there's many certified pacifouse apartment buildings. So there's like one end of it and then anything smaller is possible. One thing that gets really interesting as you get down to smaller houses is the mass starts to get a bit trickier because you've got less on the lower area to spread your air tightness across. And so it can be a bit harder with smaller homes to achieve the air tightness outcome. That's a physical limitation. But yeah, there's been plenty of like tiny homes and things like that with how to crack. Actually, I started a guy the other day who was having a crack with a pacifouse architect to do a pacifouse tiny house. But it's like pretty much pacifouse, but for some little element, we can't get the signal from it. Most likely air tightness. Yeah. And the other one, the other technical one might be because it can be moved because a big portion of pacifouse assessment is the shading. So like the booting to the north of us. You're packing like that in the pacifouse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Maybe let's start with the wall because that is definitely a big feature when you come in here. Yep. It stands out. What is that? Because then let's not paint. Guys watching the video. Yeah. Yeah. That is. You taught me Ramd earth. Ramd earth. Yeah. What is Ramd earth? So Ramd earth would be called a thermal regulator. Okay. So Ramd earth is one type of thermal mass. Lots of people think of thermal mass and they think bricks. Yeah. And sometimes concrete. Ramd earth is at the regulator end of the scale for thermal mass. The other end of the scale is is thermal battery. Okay. So Ramd earth is a regulator because you can kind of see that it has a kind of porous surface and that porosity goes all the way through the depth of the round earth. What that means is that as you put energy in to try to heat it up or cool it down, that energy can't dissipate through the round earth really quickly because of all the little air gaps. And that means that it takes a lot of energy for a really long time to actually warm it up. It becomes a regulator. The reason that we did it the way we did it here is like it's in the void. So it means that you have when you come in you can look up and you see this big corner. For one of the other reasons that it's in this void is that this is where all the vertical air movement is going to occur in the house because you've got this big open space from top to bottom. So it's the best place for a thermal regulator. It gives the benefit of you know you get maximum contact time between the air and the round earth which gives you a really good opportunity to cool it down or warm it up. What is this big box here? So this is the mechanical hierocoverry ventilation unit. So it's the fourth pillar of passive houses. It runs 24/7. It's got a tiny little fan in it that is sucking air in to the house from outside at the same time as it's sucking air out of all the wet areas. So bathroom and the kitchen and the laundry. So in all this places there are events. Yeah those two air flows are crossing by each other and at the same time there's fresh air being pumped into all the like always called the dry areas, bedrooms and the living spaces. The exhaust air that has had the heat taken out of it is going back out to atmosphere and it also dehumidifies because as one is cooled down it gives off its moisture. So what that achieves is that you are getting CO2-laden air remover from the house along with any contaminants in the house and you're bringing in air and it's being dried by the process of heat recovery and warmed up on a day like today because even if you go to walk along the beach you're still breathing air that's laden with all sorts of stuff. And so that's one of the reasons why when you talk about your passion about making things healthier. This would be a big component of healthier health and that people are looking at. And we're putting these in more and more of even the non-certified passive houses that we're building where we're putting them into a lot. We have three sort of standards that we build to and the high efficiency standard which is the middle one. We're pretty much 100% of those are getting centralized mechanical haker recovery ventilation and owners are specifically going for that because of knowing they're going to have fresh clean filter there. And it was used as one of the one of like many things to start really pushing building code changes because yeah Sweden has really well-built house. It's fascinating that this has now become a big thing and that's something I know we're going to talk more about today. Something was a system in the I live overseas in Germany for a year. Yeah. And a lot of the features was in the house that I was in there. Yep. That home was built like 15, 20 years ago. Yeah, these aren't new. These have been around for a long time. But the technology of passive house has been around since the 80s. Oh wow. Okay. When did it come to Australia? The first one in south Australia was over a decade ago and this is the second one. And then the third, fourth and fifth and sixth are all being built by us. Typically in building variations come up. Because there is a bigger impact on many things I gather if a variation has come in a passive house, you get less of that. Less variations or there's more time emphasis put on planning. There's there is it's tricky because we do a lot of things very similarly for all of our homes as we do for certified passive house. Okay. So we still provide the same level of opportunity for clients to change their minds and to change things as they go. The difference with a certified passive house is that we, if it's something that has anything to do with the thermal on the web and any of those components that kind of interface between the inside and outside world or anything to do with the appliances or electrical devices, we have to go through the PHPP again and enter that change in and see whether the house is still a passive house. So whether it's under all the requirements and if it impacts it then of course there's a discussion with the client about yeah we can do that but the heating demand is going to go up or you're calling demands going to go up. So you know the house might be less comfortable in summer if you're omitting the shading or if you decide not to put curtains on that window or whatever the thing is we're able to talk it through with them. Okay. And we then have to amend all of that documentation. So in the final set of stuff that we send to the institute we'll have a document in there saying this is all the stuff that was originally put in to say this is what we're building and that you accept it as yep it's going to be a certified passive house. There's a few things that we've done with this design. The first one is our normal things to do 920W doors. So standard size doors 820 or 820 millimeters. A 920W door is just easier to get through if you have like a walker or you want a wheelchair. One kind of falsehood that you hear a bit is people say you have to have 920 doors to get wheelchairs through. You can actually go straight through a door that's 820W in a wheelchair but turning off a hallway is a lot harder. Having 920 doors kind of helps us right. Okay. Take a lot of boxes because even though it is a narrow hallway the 920 door makes it easier. We've also designed the bathroom so that it with the addition of some hand rails and removing the shower screen it can become a disabled bathroom. And originally it had no shower screen and we had a bit of a one of these crises that you have as a as any homeowner would like right at the end of the road. We found that we had lots of clients that wanted shower screens in their houses. So we decided we'll put one in this house so that we can see what they look like. So yeah, that's the only thing you'd have to take out to make it a fully disabled access kind of bathroom. And you've got a lift? Yes, of course. Yeah, the lift is there. The lift is there because we've designed the house to suit an older demographic, but having a lift is important from mobility and it's also just practical in this house. We just explored what makes a passive house truly comfortable and healthy. Now let's head back to the interior builder's office to understand how they turn these concepts into reality for their clients, starting with that very first conversation. Most of the ones that we talk to on the phone have usually come across us somewhere on the internet and then subsequently done a Google search to find us. The best ones are the ones that they say, "Oh, we've seen this on Facebook. We've been following you for a really long time, which I always kind of extrapolate out to. They've looked at the YouTube videos and they've watched a lot of what comes up on Facebook and then they've done a Google search." And we do get the odd client that comes in who leads off with, "I've watched every video." You notice a difference in someone that has gone, "I can't across you via Google search." There's someone that says, "I've watched every video." I know I'm looking at the two extremes. There's someone who said, "I've watched every one of your videos." What is the difference that you notice there? Trust. Trust is way higher. You also get the occasional fan. Yesterday we went to a meeting with someone who I had actually forgotten that we had spoken with them ages ago and at the end she's like, "Oh, can we have a selfie in front of the house because you know, like a massive bangle?" That all goes back to the people that have watched more of what we have. Have a lot more trust in what we say. Whereas the people that just do a quick Google search generally refine that they are much lower on information, on background information, and much lower on context about us and what we do and how we work and who we've worked with and what we've achieved for other people. The amount of time spent bringing them up to speed on that is a lot longer I find. That's a good point raised there. The time that you need to spend at the front end bringing someone up to speed, given them context, educating them because you put the time in to provide an education video format ahead of time. There's a large percentage of the people that come into you having consumed that helps fast track that relationship. Yes, it's still slightly anecdotal. But certainly if you go to that first initial phone call that people book with us, they start off on a much better footing because they're there to talk about their project, not so much to talk about who I was a builder and why should we even trust you and what we're like. That's all covered off. It's more about we want to build a house and we like what you do and we like how you work and we like your process and then we're into what do you want to do. What's an initial conversation like and who handles that initial conversation? So the initial conversation goes for half an hour, predominantly over the phone. Sometimes we do it by zoom and we sort of slowly moving the model to doing them all by zoom. We have a really good process for generating the answers from the homeowners that help us to best understand what it is that they're trying to achieve and what's motivating them because it's really… What's an example if I'm a client thinking of a book in that call with you, what can I expect? So we always open by asking you to just take a step back and give us a bit of an overview of where you're at and… Where you're at with your current home and what it is that has you either depending on what box they take wanting to rebuild that house or build somewhere else or renovate and just give us a bit of an overview of what you're hoping to achieve from your building ideas and from talking to us today. From there the next thing is that if there are any bits that they didn't come up, then you can pick them up as slightly closed questions because you've already asked the mother of all open-ended questions. Based on that, we always say to them, we think for what you want to do that, it's similar to a project we build in Pionen Bank or Bridgewater or wherever it is because by the time we've listened, it gives you a chance to kind of look through the projects that we've finished and go on, ah, that's pretty similar. And then you can say, well, that project costs this much and it included these things and your project wouldn't need this or it would need this extra or whatever it is to sort of give them some idea and then you can then also add context about where that client came from budget wise to where they ended up and then point out that all of that occurred before they signed a good and contract not after. And then there was a client to give you some feedback on how that all feels because usually what you've done is just made them aware of the gap between what they think it's going to cost and what it actually costs. And so once we've explained that, we then tell them what it costs and we don't dance around it. We just say we do all of that for $299 and that's pretty true. And we're going to send you a link. And so we get that a lot. We've not put that price up. Once you've explained to someone what all they're going to get, what the value is. What the value is. There's a few different things. We the order in which we tackle things. We get to a point where we do a concept plan, then we do the plenary budget estimate from that concept plan. Sometimes there's changes to be made to the plan. Sometimes there isn't. But the time between presenting the plenary budget estimate and lodging for planning approval is as short as possible. And we lodge for planning approval, which gets us going on the thing that takes the longest amount of time. And we start on selections because selections can then be done without too much time pressure because we know there's three months in council. That then enables us to keep clients engaged and interested and not feeling pressured and get all the selections done and deal with the plan, little plan tweaks and the specification tweaks and get engineering started. So that we are sort of arriving at a place of having the engineering ready and having final pricing sort of resolved when we get planning approval. One thing you said there, keeping the client engaged and excited, that is a very, very important part. And it would be so easy and I've seen this happen a lot. It would be so easy for you to take information from the client and then go away and start working on some stuff, all the pre-construction. And then you come back to them in weeks later with an answer or indication of where things are going or something. However, there'd be so much loss opportunity. One you could lose the opportunity with knowing client engagement, but you could also, they could lose their excitement. What do you do to control more of that? I mean, one of the key things that we do is we always set a date for the next interaction. So all of our clients, if you called up any of the pre-contract ones and said, "How's going? What's happening next?" We're like, "Oh, we're doing such and such." And we've got a meeting in whatever, and we'll be a day and a time and a location. Usually what's the reach or like the role of the meeting? It always depends, but it's usually not longer than a month as you go through the process. And if it winds up being longer than a month, that's always client driven because they're busy or something comes up, which happens. How do I know I'm not getting a built? How do I know that that's worthwhile investment for what I'm getting? Yeah, that's always the trickiest bit because what I can say is that I have stand here and hear all the arguments about how to make something more economical. And I hear the estimators on the phone with Subby's driving the price down. And negotiating with Subby's based on previous prices and saying, "This has gone off and it doesn't make any sense and it should really be this price based on where you charge on this other job." So those, but all of those conversations, they all happen behind the front door office and the homeowner. There's plenty of arguments that have happened in here about how to make something cheaper to build while still giving the client everything they've asked for. And still making it a healthy, comfortable home. and ticking all those boxes where, you know, the end of it, I've gone mad, I really wish that they were here to see that because it is really difficult to go through every little detail of a course because it's not like a shopping cart full of groceries. You can't just, you often can't just take one thing out of a good without impacting three or four other things. The bits about making sure that clients are getting value for money comes from the work that we do in the background to make sure that we're getting the best possible deal that we can on everything. And the knowledge that all builders charge about the same or get charged about the same amount of money from most of the things that they buy. The difference to a homeowner is how organized the builder is when they get to the point of signing a building contract. And then of course how well they understand that contract and deliver on it. What does that look like for you? You walk through the prospective client at that stage in person. They come in here and they walk through the agreement with you or what? Yeah, so the contracts are always, we send the contract about a month before signing. So that they can see what's in it and it gives them plenty of time to ask questions. And or if they really want to go and get a legal opinion, you can't change it because it's a master builder's standard contract. But it gives them plenty of time to do those things. And then that way when we get to the point of like, okay, we're ready to sign it because we're just scheduled to start the work. They they're all comfortable and everything, you know, everyone knows where everyone's at. Yeah, all of our presentations and all our communication is done in 3D. So when we present, when you come in for your design presentation, we have it up on the projector. And we give you a full 3D walkthrough of your whole house. And it's like a random thing. That'd be very important to me because I know for myself I struggle to interpret two-dimensional working drawings. We have the VR goggles and everyone sets up at the end here. The thing that got us on to VR was I was always keen on it. We started doing 3D for every single project. And we were finding that lots of clients were looking at the 3D on the wall and going, "Oh, then we know it's too small and the bedrooms too small." And they're like, "No, this is like a 5x5 bedroom. This is huge." I wonder what do you think was the issue there? They just couldn't just the way that it projects onto the screen. Like looking at the outside of houses works really well and looking at big open spaces like kitchen living dining seems to work really well. But when you go into a bedroom, for some reason you can see the walls on each side. And I don't know, it's a trick of the eye. Yeah. And the VR completely solved that problem. Okay. Now I've gone through the process. You'll create that pre-construction process. Why is it important for that process to be repeatable and consistent? I want to make sure, like a lot of builders grow. And the story that you hear is, "Oh yeah, they're really big now and they're not great to deal with." So I want to grow without losing any of the things that made us good when we were smaller or when we were this size. So making sure that we have a process that is repeatable. And is easy to understand. And then combining that with a big part of our process is our recruitment process. And we have some very specific things that we look for. The best way to boil it down is that we hire for character because we can teach skills. It is not the easy road. But it is definitely the best road for retaining people. Because you go out there and they all have a lot of very similar views on the world. And they all have different takes on everything. They're all individuals. But they have a lot of commonality. And they're characters such that they're focused on doing the best for clients. And they prioritize integrity over profits because sometimes in the short term that can be painful but in the long term you always win. From initial consultation to detailed planning we've seen how Enduro builders guides clients through the process. But how do these energy efficient principles actually come together during construction? Let's visit an active build site to see healthy homes construction in action. Talk to the clients for this project. Was their vision or how did you guys arrive at this? They sought us out specifically for pass-and-right from the very first interaction. It was where he had a build a pass-and-pass. Most of the other pass-and-passes were building all we've built. Have all the pretty modern designs. Yeah, skill in roofs and that really modern look. Did your design team enjoy that? Yeah, yeah. And it presented some unique challenges because one of the things about this house is the homeowner's wanted to use hemp crate. And hemp crate is really difficult for air tightness. So we've designed it into the house so that it basically features in the house on one side or the other. So the key thing there is that it becomes, it'll become like a feature that you see as you come down the hole. You can see where there's like the flat that's plywood. That's going to have exposed rafters. That's kind of like a faux exposed rafter look. And yeah, the hemp crate kind of gives you that like masonry like finish. It's a really unique masonry finish. So between all of those things, they, yeah, they, they, they obviously came to us because of the pass-and-pass, but they also had done that research and knew that we were open to working with different building materials and open to working out the problems that come with that. And the other thing too is learning, learning about new materials with the building science knowledge that we have. Yeah. It, your, you're a lot more rigorous as you go through like, how is this going to work? Is it going to be safe? Is it going to be healthy? How do we make sure? This is one of my, one of my big things is making sure that we always encourage homeowners away from things that we know are going to generate a lot of problems for them in the future. And so whenever we have homeowners who want things that we know are going to give them problems, we talk through it from the perspective of we know that this product or this choice can be problematic in the future for these reasons. And we, we just want you to avoid that pain and anguish. Yeah. So then they're making more informed decision. Yeah. Yeah. And if after all that, they decide to go with it, we're still going to support them. Yeah. Yeah. If at least they go in with their eyes open. Yeah. One thing that we discussed at the office earlier was just obviously a lot of communication going on pre-construction. Yeah. Again, dealing with that fear that some people have and helping all of our builders understand to get in the mind of a client in the fear of, okay, once you, once you saw me up, do I still have access to you? Yeah. I'm not going to hear from you. I'm not going to inform about what's going on. What have I changed from mind on something? All that. Being here on a construction site, how much communication is being had with the client during all of this going on? They're at the very basic level. The bare minimum is that we have the fortnightly site meeting with the clients. And during those fortnightly meetings, we go through what's happened the last two weeks. What's happening the next two weeks? And give them an opportunity to ask any questions. And if there's anything that we need clarity on, we ask those questions then. And that is backed up by the online project management system where they can see the schedule and they can see the photos that are getting taken every day on site and they can see all of the progress that's occurring, even if they're not going to site. The basic thing is that the project schedule is the center point. Lots of builders have picked up on marketing the on-time on budget line. And one of the things that is really important about that line is the on-time part because usually most builders that you see go broke, they've got 10 or 15 jobs when they do normally three or four a year. And they've got a whole bunch of clients that are like, "Yeah, my job's been at a standstill for months." And what that says is there's no organisation. And the only way to easily do organisation on building is with your project schedule. And the project schedule for us ties in with our subbies. So they get notifications. So they know a month or more in advance of when we need them on site doing that thing. And what it is that we need them to do. And clients have access to that. So clients are ever wondering about what's coming up in between us telling them about it every fortnight. They can look at the project schedule and they can see all the way through to the end. And things do change. Like I've spoken and it would be like, "Ah, projects schedules are waste of time because everything changes." - Yeah. - Like, you'd be amazed what doesn't change once you have a schedule and you book someone in and a month in advance, but you also can't help the weather and you can't help something going wrong. You can't help the truck dropping the materials and not in the place that you're marked out for them and all those little things. But the thing is that having a schedule means that you've got the foundation really well covered and that gives you the time to deal with all the little things that don't quite work out. And if you have to adjust the schedule, then at least you know exactly what the impact is. - Yeah. - So you're not left going, "Oh, that guy's delayed by a month." Or we'll just see him in a month. - Yeah. - You can go to the schedule and go, "Well, actually, that's gonna blow us out." So we need to find another contractor. Well, we need to go back to that contractor and say, "If you can't come this way, like we told you about three or four months ago and reminds you every month since, then you have to get someone else to do it." I'm just amazing how contractors are only free up and they're able to come when you're in mind and that, "Hey, it's not like we called you yesterday." Yeah. And said, "We need you today." We've been talking about this for ages. So it's all around that, that's a good deal. Within the industry, I think that we're already starting to see more builders coming and looking at the way that we're building now and going, "Yeah, I want to do that." I think that is great for homeowners and it's why I have the other business where we're providing help and support to the builders that want to do that. And one of the reasons that I do that is because the other thing that will start to occur is builders that will try to emulate those types of building things, like making sure that you're building buildings that dry out and don't get wet by using proper building membranes. The builders that will try to find the cheaper way to do that and get themselves into trouble, which will then generate a lot of bad press around building an energy efficient home. You're gonna have a low-d house. You don't want to do that. (upbeat music) - There's some interesting conversations lately with some people who just I would not to go with you a few years ago. And they've now recently reached out and you asked them, "How's your house?" - Yep. - And they said, "It's still under construction." And they've been helping like four years. And they're like, "You should have been in your house a few years by now." - Yeah, yeah. - What happened there? - Basically, they weren't with a recommendation from a real estate agent without, and at that point, hadn't got a price from that other builder. They just weren't with that builder because of that recommendation. I'm just remembering back then, I was actually 2021. So, and it's a big house. Like, to us, it would be like a 14 month build, like the house at Woodford, that was a 14 month build. But those plans were done, they were done by an architect that I worked with a bit. So they didn't need too much fixed off on them to be buildable. And they were approved for construction at the time. So there was nothing really stopping you from just getting selections done and going for it. So there would be no reason why you shouldn't have started like mid 2022, maybe late 2022. And then 14 months on from that should be done. It's probably at about this stage, like they've based on the photos that I saw last week. So they don't quite, they're not quite up to putting plasterboard on yet. So whereas like I said before, it's like April now and in schedule, we're handing this over in July. There's always a component of if you show someone something really complicated and ask them to give you a fixed price on it, you will often get a really inflated price. And so sometimes what we do when we're doing something new is we take on the risk as the builder. So we work it through with whatever trade it is. Like how many things, like it all went well, how long you reckon and take. And you've got to push and pull in a little bit to get a number. We go all right, well, let's say that it didn't go perfectly. What would you do and how long it would have taken? And from that, we go all right, we're going to allow this much to do it. If it runs over, we'll wear it. And so then I'm sure heaps of builders would listen to what I just said and go, "Are you nuts?" - Yeah. - But the thing is that it's a very controlled risk and it's more often than not with a regular sub-e. - Yeah. - So we often share the load if we both manage to make an error. We've also had projects where we did that and we talked it through with the client and we said, "So we've allowed this much." And we can either do it as a provisional sum which means you're up for any overrun or we can just make it a fixed part. And if it runs under, then we're going to get a win. But if it's a fixed part, then the win is ours. And if you make it provisional, then it could go either way. You might get a credit, you might get a cost. And then we just let clients decide. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)