New Zealand will need to nearly double the number of building industry tradespeople it has to meet a predicted $24 billion spike in residential and commercial building work across New Zealand in the next 10 years.
That's the message from the Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation (BCITO), which is running a nationwide series of information sessions aimed at attracting school-leavers to the building trades.
"The predicted increase in building work will be so large that, once the boom starts, there will be a chronic shortage of industry professionals,'' Wellington-based BCITO chief executive Ruma Karaitiana told The Star.
"New Zealand's building industry has been in a bust period for a few years now but that's all about to change.
"With pent-up demand, leaky-building remediation and rebuilding in Christchurch, the industry will be busier than ever before,'' he said.
According to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the upper North Island faces $12b worth of repairs on leaky buildings, including $11b on 42,000 homes and $1.1b on non-residential buildings.
In addition, the Government estimates $12b will need to be spent on replacing about 10,000 homes, repairing about 100,000 homes, and replacing or repairing non-residential buildings in earthquake-hit Canterbury, Mr Karaitiana said.
This expenditure would come on top of pent-up demand caused by significantly less than the optimum 20,000 housing units being built in New Zealand in the past few years.
This had been mostly because of the difficult economic situation and a tightening-up of lending, Mr Karaitiana said.
While the situation remained fluid, particularly in relation to the complicated insurance situation in Canterbury, employers in that region had begun looking for apprentices.
"Now is definitely the time to get people thinking about a career in the building industry and these national sessions will hopefully get the ball rolling,'' Mr Karaitiana said.
It was estimated that New Zealand at present had a building industry workforce of about 31,800. This would need to increase to about 50,000 across the country to meet the demand, he said.
It had been forecast that building activity would be increasing by now but the complicated situation domestically and internationally meant that any increase was now expected to be around April 2012, Mr Karaitiana said.
"In the coming years, we will also find ourselves competing internationally with Japan and Australia, who are also looking at major rebuilding programmes.''
There would be opportunities across all of the building trades, including building, masonry, brick-laying, concreting, plastering, tiling and more, he said.
Otago Association of Master Builders president Mark Ward said the time was right for young men and women to look at the building industry as a career.
"There could be 10 years of guaranteed work in Christchurch,'' Mr Ward said.
"No-one knows exactly when the boom will start but it takes time to learn the skills of the trade, so the sooner they start the better.
"It's a great industry to work in and there are going to be plenty of opportunities - I would encourage people to go for it,'' he said.
