The construction industry has had a rough start to the year, as rising costs including skyrocketing building material prices send some companies under.
Building and construction is well ahead of other industries when it comes to businesses going into liquidation so far this year.
The crunch is only exacerbating the property downturn, impacting homeowners too.
Damien Grant from Insolvency business Waterstone says he’s dealing with more failed ventures in the building sector than any other at the moment, telling Tova O'Brien home builders are doing it especially hard.
"Because of inflation in the building sector, they can't build [properties] up to $2 million bucks... they’re underwater," Grant said.
"Customers are suddenly saying, 'cripes, that building’s not going to be worth $2 million bucks' - or people who are building houses on spec [are] expecting to be able to sell that property for $1-2 million bucks, suddenly realising they can't sell it for as much as they could before.
"Compounding it, also, they've got issues of actually doing people into the country, which is the real bottleneck for some builders."
Grant said adding to this, the Government is clamping down on Tradies not paying tax.
"That's probably going to make things worse for the builders in the construction sector as well," he said.
"Part of the problem is that the sector itself is just simply shrinking and as the sector shrinks, there's going to be a flight to quality."
Listen to the full interview between Damien Grant and Tova above.
You can also download the full interview on the Tova podcast, and listen on the go.
