Frustrating delays for new homes as consents pile up
Friday, 4 March 2022
Waiting times for home building consents have ballooned in Christchurch, slowing housing construction and pushing up costs.
Consenting delays at Christchurch City Council have worsened markedly over the past year, and the percentage of residential consents issued within the legally required four weeks has slumped as low as 23 per cent.
Some builders are reporting that consents are taking several months.
The delays come at a time when the housing construction is already hard-hit by building material shortages and price rises.
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Home Trends Builders director Peter de Gouw has about six builds under way in the city and said all had taken several months to be consented.
De Gouw said the knock-on effects of the delayed consents on his business had been “huge, profound”.
“The last one took 70-plus working days before they even started looking at it, and after that it was another six or eight weeks,” he said.
“We’ve had another one in for 40 days and we’ve just been told it will be another five weeks before someone is assigned to process it.
“I’m expecting that will drag out even further.”
De Gouw said it was “very frustrating” to have construction sites sitting idle and his workers contracted out while the costs of building materials rose.
He said he and other builders were assured the service would improve when they met with senior council staff last year. The council’s processes seemed “antiquated” and inefficient, and staff could visit a site 14 or 20 times, each requiring a booking, De Gouw said.
“A lot of promises that were made about everything being back to normal by March. It’s March now, and things have got substantially worse.”
It now took about two years from buying land to finishing a house, he said.
During October, November, and December only 23 to 24 per cent of the city’s council’s residential building consents were issued within the statutory 20 working days, excluding pauses while builders answered requests for further information.
By January and February this non-compliance had improved to about a third.
Record levels of home building has boosted the average monthly number of consent applications to the city council to 550, up from 400 a few years ago. More than half of the city’s new homes are now attached units.
The council’s head of building consenting, Robert Wright, said they were getting more complex applications, and a rising proportion was for multi-unit developments. They were triaging applications if asked, and if possible, he said.
The council’s website says while time frames have “vastly improved” for processing simpler applications, high volumes and complex applications were “continuing to cause delays in our processing time frames” and qualified staff are in short supply nationally.
“We understand that people need certainty to move forward with their plans – we are sorry this situation is affecting all of us,” the site says.
The Government removed the council’s consenting authority for 18 months from mid-2013 because of a post-earthquake backlog of both residential and commercial consents.
International Accreditation New Zealand (IANZ) last reported on the council’s consenting performance in March last year, a month when the council issued 94 per cent of building consents on time. The report identified 12 non-serious issues to be addressed, but found no serious problems.
The percentage of residential consents issued within the required four weeks fell steadily for the rest of the year and had slumped to 23 per cent by November.
The next IANZ report is scheduled for March 2023.
In October the Combined Building Suppliers Cooperative (CBS), which represents small-to-medium builders and tradespeople, wrote to the Government asking it to intervene over the consenting delays, citing Christchurch as the worst performer.
“Some builders will not speak up due to fear of being ‘red flagged’ at [Christchurch City] Council. One of our shareholders has lost $100,000 in holding costs while waiting over 57 days for a simple new house consent,” the letter said.
CBS chair Carl Taylor said this week the Government had not acted, and while the council was trying to ease the bottleneck, consenting except for straightforward builds had not improved.
The council now has about 40 building consent staff to process applications, up from 35 a year ago, and in that time six have left and 11 arrived. Three contractors are being used.