An Open Letter

For more than 28 years, Ausmar Homes have prided ourselves on creating a memorable experience for all of our clients. Right now though, we feel like we’re not living up to these standards and it’s impacting our clients, trades and staff. Please know we understand and share every concern. We are listening and we want to speak up, standing by our three pillars of Honesty, Transparency and Integrity.

The simple truth: we can’t build a home as fast and efficiently as we could 2 years ago. The Australian Governments economic response to Coronavirus, HomeBuilder initiative accompanied by worldwide initiatives created manufacturing and supply chain issues resulting in never seen before material and labour shortages. Add to this, the many variants of COVID and continued wet weather, we’ve had the perfect storm for a terrible start to 2022. For context, an average single-story build used to take us 12-16 weeks, whereas now due to the before-mentioned material and labour shortages, the same home can take up to 26 weeks to build. 

Over the last 2+ years our industry has been tipped on its head. As a business, we went from managing display home closures, lockdowns, staff working from home, redundancies, to a level of enquiry we’ve never seen before in early 2021 and now 2022. Our entire industry cannot possibly keep up with demand. 

Ausmar Homes is not a multi-national company. We are owned and run by three hardworking, house loving locals. Rich and Tony are both carpenters turned builders and Josh, our General Manager, has been turned into a builder by the other two. All three have an equal passion for building homes for happy clients. The current market has us stressed, frustrated and disappointed as you are. 

The media has been hard on builders, mostly deserved and mostly true. If you have followed the news stories, you’ll have seen many closures, and reports of more builders to follow. There have been many like us forced to lift contract prices to match our supplier increases, for no other reason than to break even.

In the history of our operations, this is not something we ever thought would happen. We have tried to absorb these increases for as long as we can, however the fact remains true. If we don’t sell a home for more than it costs to build, we won’t be around for very long. For those that have suffered this stress and received the price increase phone call we wholeheartedly apologise. Josh helped carry out most of these calls himself and has noted it was the hardest thing he has ever done in business. The looming feeling that we are ruining people’s lives, was and is still apparent. 

As an industry for the last 25 years, we have not employed enough young apprentices, trained enough skilled staff, manufactured enough products in Australia, nor have we planned enough for the future, and our children’s future. Ausmar Homes recognises this. Richard who manages our commercial division regularly talks about his frustration of simply exhausting supply avenues on a weekly basis. Our database of long term and very loyal suppliers is exhausted. Border closures, international migration halted and COVID isolations have all added to the problems. The hunt for crucial skilled trades like concreters, carpenters, bricklayers, painters, and tilers is endless and ongoing.

Does this all mean we stop the journey of building new homes? No, most certainly not. It just means we all need some patience and compassion for everyone involved in the process. There is absolutely nothing better in this world than designing and moving into your very own dream home. We believe everyone deserves that opportunity. We are still building homes to the quality we pride ourselves on; we are still handing over homes to excited homeowners and we are still signing contracts for starts into the future. It just means it will all take longer than we have been used to for a little while yet.

Josh, Richard, and Tony would very much like to thank you for your business and remind you that their direct numbers are always open, and they are happy to hear from you. All of us at Ausmar Homes are ready, waiting and hoping for things to return to normal as soon as possible – and we know you guys are too!

If you missed our LIVE discussion on Facebook with Caroline from Mix FM, we’ve shared the video below.