Everybody agrees Australia needs more homes. We have promised ourselves 1.2 million of them by 2029 and we are already behind. Ask why and you get the usual list: land, approvals, labour, materials, interest rates.

All true. I want to talk about a reason that never makes the news.

Running a construction business is a royal pain, and over the last ten years it has gotten harder, not easier.

Ten years ago a builder ran on a phone, a spreadsheet and email. Today it's job management software, accounting software, estimating software, a timesheets app, a safety app, document control. And email still carries half the real information about any job. Someone pays for all of it, learns it, and keeps it in sync. Usually the owner, after hours.

I've spent the past few months sitting with builders and the people who run their back offices. Owner operators juggling four jobs. Commercial builders doing $15 million a year. The pattern is the same at every size.

One contracts administrator keeps nine spreadsheets per project, on top of the software, to track the things the software can't. A site manager gets more than a hundred emails a day. An owner fills in a cost spreadsheet by hand every day, and if he types one number wrong the whole thing is out.

A decade of new software moved the admin around and sent the industry a bill.

Then there's the money. One builder told me they miss around $200,000 a year in variations that never get billed. The work gets done, the builder wears the cost, and nobody notices until the job closes. Another watched a $25,000 callout slip past the deadline to claim it because it was sitting in an email thread. His words: a straight whack. Nearly every builder I spoke to said some version of the same thing. You can be losing money on a job and not know until the end.

The usual answer is to buy another system or put on another person. More software has not closed the gap, and a new hire comes out of the same margin the leak is already eating. A big builder absorbs that, with the people and the room to carry it. A growing one, with good processes and nothing spare, wears it.

The people we need to build those 1.2 million homes are running businesses with thin margins, endless admin and all the risk. Construction tops ASIC's insolvency statistics year after year. Every builder that goes under takes homes, subbies and apprentices down with it.

And the pain compounds at exactly the moment a builder tries to grow. Going from five jobs to fifteen multiplies the admin. More subbies to chase, more claims, more approvals, more threads where a $4,000 variation quietly disappears. The standard fix is to hire. Put on a contracts administrator, another PM, someone in the office to hold it together. It helps. Builders with a dedicated contracts administrator do catch more of the variations, and things still slip. One coordinator I sat with already has admin people and systems around him, and at forty jobs work still falls through, because every extra person is another one to brief, another inbox where the latest word on a job can sit, and more chasing to keep everyone lined up.

The salary also comes out of a margin that was already thin, and it lands before the extra jobs do. So the builder carries a bigger wage bill on the same work, and has to win more work to cover it, which creates more admin, which is the reason they hired in the first place. Plenty of capable builders look at that and decide to stay small. Some of the best operators I've met do a second, unpaid job at the kitchen table every night instead.

So we ask this industry to solve the housing crisis while running a construction company gets a little worse every year.

The builders I've met aren't asking for sympathy. They want fewer systems to babysit and to get paid for all the work they did. There's an upside too. In a labour shortage, the builder whose systems hold up is the one subbies want to work for.

The housing shortage has a dozen causes. This one we can fix.

~ Kosta