Breaking Ground Part 2: How Earlier Collaboration Can Increase Housing Supply

By

Shauna Hurley

Last Updated Jul 15, 2026

By

Shauna Hurley

In the second of this three-part Procore State of Housing series, we move from why Australia's housing crisis starts before construction begins to what needs to change, and why stronger collaboration between civil and residential construction is critical to unlocking supply.

In part one of our Breaking Ground: State of Housing series, Andrew Hay,  Group Executive, Head of McNab Property, and Nicholas Proud, CEO of the Civil Contractors Federation, joined Procore Industry Transformation Lead Andy Rampton to look at how land, infrastructure and civil works shape housing supply before construction begins, and where bottlenecks are contributing to Australia’s deepening housing crisis.

Here in part two, they turn their attention to what needs to change to increase supply. Setting housing targets, changing regulatory settings and rezoning land are only part of the picture. Andy, Andrew and Nicholas took a closer look at whether Australia needs “greater collaboration than ever before” between residential construction, civil contractors and infrastructure providers, and what benefits that could deliver.

Why housing delivery needs stronger industry collaboration

A shared snapshot of the current market landscape highlighted the challenges of collaboration between builders, developers and civil contractors of different sizes.

“Over the years I’ve done a lot of work with dog-in-a-ute builders working hard around the country,” Nicholas says. “I see this disconnect they have from the people who were there before the slab, and the price-taker position they’re often in.”

By the time many smaller builders arrive, planning rules, civil works, infrastructure timing, contributions and cost escalation can already be locked in.

If you just take Tasmania as an example, you have 29 councils working on 37 planning schemes. You go from one town to the next, and you’ve got different setbacks, different heights. How complicated is that for a small business owner?

Nicholas Proud

CEO

Civil Contractors Federation

Smaller builders deliver a large share of Australia’s homes, but can also be far removed from the earlier decisions that shape their cost, timing and feasibility.

“If we’re talking about 180,000 homes, and they’re delivering 60,000, 80,000 or 100,000 of those, it’s hard to know how to better connect them to all of the stages before them,” Nicholas says.

The same challenge applies across the civil contracting market. While CCF represents major contractors, Nicholas says many of its members are smaller operators working in local and regional markets. That mix of large and smaller operators is why housing supply needs coordination across the whole market, not just with the biggest players.

“We have over a thousand smaller operators, and they’re the lifeblood of developing everything in this country,” he says.

Major developers, by contrast, are often better placed to coordinate land, infrastructure and delivery because they have the scale and balance sheets to sequence more of the process.

“If I think about the major developers in the country, they’re in a better position to try and sequence works,” Nicholas says. “They do a reasonably good job, and if it wasn’t for some of those large players who were delivering thousands of homes a year, we would be in a further deeper hole in terms of the number of homes built.”

The challenge is to better connect those different parts of the market, so decisions about land, infrastructure and civil works are understood earlier by the people who will ultimately deliver housing.

“At a national level, the Federal Government has convened the National Construction Industry Forum, which we’re part of as the CCF together with other organisations and groups like the Housing Industry Association (HIA), Property Council, Master builders and unions including the CFMEU, AWU, AMWU and ETU.”

“We meet every two months and have worked together to develop a Blueprint for the Future report, that aims to better identify the blockages and try to understand from the top down how we can work to unlock them,” he says. 

Andrew supports efforts to increase cross-industry collaboration and takes a similar view on the need to support large, mid-sized and smaller developers.

A good market is one without a monopoly or oligopoly. We want industry participants large and small, so we need the infrastructure providers to work not just with the big tier one firms, but with the smaller developers and the mid-sized developers. How do you work together to give people greater certainty? Because that's what people are looking for.

Andrew Hay

Group Executive, Head of McNab Property

McNab Property

Bringing new thinking to persistent land-supply problems

For Andrew, one practical opportunity is to bring landowners, civil contractors, developers and government together before projects take shape, particularly where land is likely to be rezoned and ownership is fragmented across many owners.

"In the case of urban footprints, much of the land that's going to be rezoned for land release, and then the requirement for infrastructure and for developers, is typically fragmented," he says. "There's an assumption that some 60 per cent or more of these parcels are going to be amalgamated to create the master plan communities we talk about. That's where the infrastructure plays such an important role."

Andrew says one solution is to engage them well ahead of time.

Building the connections for closer collaboration

Nicholas sees broader recognition of the link between infrastructure investment and housing as central to fundamentally changing the housing supply landscape and reducing bottlenecks.

"Ultimately, we need to start to understand and acknowledge how investment into roads, highways, subdivisions and infrastructure will actually provide a correlating increase in the number of homes started and delivered," Nicholas says. “If we can do that, I think we'll get closer to breaking some of the deadlocks we have in housing and see greater collaboration across the board."

Written by

Shauna Hurley

20 articles

Shauna is never short of questions when it comes to construction, tech and science. A professional writer, researcher and podcast producer, she loves sitting down with industry insiders for in-depth interviews that uncover the latest developments, debates and emerging trends. Having worked with organisations like Microsoft and the European Bank of Reconstruction, Shauna joined Procore to explore the complex issues facing construction and share fresh, research-rich insights that help professionals navigate a rapidly evolving industry.

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