LifeMark and Homestar: 23 January 2024

Whoop whoop celebrations….

My completed Manurewa Project has now be awarded:

LifeMark 5* (Universal Design for full wheelchair access)

AND

HomeStar 7.0 v4.1. 

Note: Homestar rates a home’s energy/resource usage and environmental impact 

These three homes have left the NZ Building Code and H1 requirements in the dust!!

And we did it in a heck of a bad inflation year, with two significant disputes, and enough bad weather to keep Noah’s Ark afloat for 9 months.

How much did it cost… enough… but essentially the same as much lower specification stand-alone villas.

Note: my external works were higher than normal due to the site challenges (off-set by the land price). And the works were quite inefficient… the story is far too long to even start on it.

Who helped me do it?

An entire team… but also those in the shadows… the ones on the end of the telephone or pouring the cups-of-tea.

Profitability is low in a project like this BUT low risk as it had been pre-sold to a community housing provider.

I made it work because I got the land pre-price boom (challenging site though) and I pre-sold it during the boom.

I micro managed it within an inch of its life to come out of it on the right side of the bottom line and fought the good fight to get owed monies returned.

For build costs it lined up with my initial feasibility ONLY because I had added in two escalation factors i.e. above normal contingencies.