Toa Homes, the Kiwi housing company with giant ambitions
Monday, 8 December 2025
The Small Business Project is a weekly series that shines the spotlight on Kiwi small businesses doing interesting and unusual things in their industries.
Entrepreneur James Bushell is general manager of Toa Homes, a joint venture between Ngāti Toa Rangatira and How We Live Investments. The business has created a new technology that challenges the status quo when it comes to healthy homes, and aims to have it used across the motu in ways the company says will reduce healthcare costs for the occupant.
What has your venture set out to achieve?
Toa Homes builds healthy homes at entry-level pricing ($3800/sqm) using an innovative panel system. It sprang from a report [written by ethical business champion Motif Agency, of which Bushell is the founding director] called How We Live, in which different ways to do housing were being explored. We’d spent a lot of time trying to solve human rights challenges and supporting charities, and when we did this report, we discovered how central housing was to so many of the social challenges that we face, from health to sense of belonging, cost of living, a range of different things. We hadn't really understood how central a role it played; it was quite shocking.
We thought something must be done to address it.
We joined up with Ngāti Toa and looked at how could we forge a new housing pathway. We did a business case first, bringing in a whole lot of external consultants, from sustainability experts to passive house consultants to engineers and architects, to see whether we could create something unique, that wasn’t just available to the rich, but a technology that is accessible to all.
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How much time and money have you invested?
To set the business up after we proved the business case was $800,000. We're not turning a profit yet, but we're looking to turn a profit next year. The road to selling houses is a long one. It often takes a year or so to be in the right position to think about it, to go through the designs, the consents, but we've got a lot of the homes on the books for next year that we're looking to proceed with.
The technology that we have created is around standardisation rather than mass customisation. We create Lego blocks that we can just pump out over and over again, and then you can put that together and essentially create passive quality homes for a similar cost to a New Zealand code minimum.
What’s the biggest challenge your business is facing?
We started in a massive downturn, and a lot of government funded community housing providers dried up. We had a number of projects lined up that we're going to go straight into, that was our testing ground, and those funds dried up, and that was a hard hit. What we've had to do is pivot and rebuild. Originally, we were going to be doing internal projects before we went to the external market, but this has allowed us to quickly create brands and websites and bring it to the public, as well as our own internal projects.
What’s the biggest issue impacting your industry?
For me, it's how we think about homes. People think a healthy home is a code minimum home. We’re trying to support the industry, because we want everyone to do well, but also improve industry standards. The current houses that we're building aren't fit for purpose, and we need to be building better for people. From a governance perspective, if we want to look at healthcare savings, that is where we need to be investing our money.
What’s next for Toa Homes?
Right now there is needless health challenges within New Zealand society. About 75% of our houses have condensation, 48% have reported visible mould in their homes, and so what we're trying to do is reframe how people think about housing. When you're buying your fridge or dishwasher or toilet, it's got a performance rating. With houses, we don't look for the same thing even though it’s the most important asset that we buy. If we can change thinking, it could have a dramatic effect, most importantly, on people’s their health and well being, but then also on the cost of heating a house - it reduces by about 90%.
Currently we’re building our own homes. But we would love to be able to provide the panels to anybody, so any builder can use them and get them off the shelf at the likes of ITMs. That's sort of the aspiration. We're looking at a project now where we might do our first one of those, where we just supply the panels and get another builder to do it all. Until it is fully open to the market, we’re about one to two years away.
What’s one thing you wish you’d known before starting the business?
There's 1000 things we do differently because of the way things have turned out, but it's very hard to predict these things. Had we known the environment, we would have probably gone straight to setting up an external-facing business. Having, as soon as you can, multiple channels to market, so that if one dries up you have the ability to pivot more quickly.
Most helpful piece of advice you have ever received?
Focus on what you can control. There's lots of things you can't control, and so take a breath and working with what you know that you can do. The rest you have to leave to chance. You can try to influence that as much as you can, but don't dwell on what you can't control.
As a start up you have to be agile. We do regular check-ins and 60-day strategy sessions, just because it changes so regularly.
If you would like your business to feature in The Small Business Project, email Aimee Shaw at aimee.shaw@stuff.co.nz