Established house-builder Anthem Homes laying staff off after ‘tough market conditions’

The residential building sector is going through harder times. Photo / George Novak

Material shortages, falling sales, rising interest rates and house price drops have made life tougher for house builders and one well-established business running for more than 20 years has already taken the tough decision to lay off some staff.

In what its chief called “restructuring”, that busy business which has built 24 new homes annually for a total of $11.7 million says it needs to change to adapt to the new reality.

Douw Van Der Merwe, a director of Hamilton-based Anthem Homes which was registered in 1999, announced the changes.

“Anthem Homes is in the process of restructuring to adapt to the tough market conditions,” he said.

“We are going through the process of communicating the final decision to the impacted staff today. We are only communicating the outcome to the team including our apprentices today, except for one that decided he had enough of working with us through the process a resigned earlier today.”

Van Der Merwe met staff last week and explained the need to reduce numbers. He said the restructuring would reduce staff numbers to adapt for expected tough times ahead.

“We also informed all our trades and suppliers and wider network of the restructuring, so it is public knowledge,” he said.

He declined to cite the actual staff numbers.

Work & Income’s Covid site listed Anthem homes as getting a wage subsidy of $60,000 for nine paid staff initially. A subsequent payment in August 2021 of $22,554 was for 20 staff.

BCI, which regularly issues data to its paying clients on the number of new homes built annually, had Anthem Homes constructing 24 places in the year from October 2021 to September last year.

The average size of an Anthem home was 171 sq m, far bigger than others building apartments and townhouses at volume and speed, BCI data showed.

Anthem was listed as selling each house for an average $490,424. That doesn’t include the land: just the finished home.

The housebuilder said it had “enjoyed great success” for over 20 years.

“From the beginning, we have valued building homes by creating a partnership between ourselves and our clients, and this has remained the core foundation of the Anthem Homes community.”

Staff at the business work in operations, finance, client services, sales, construction, design, building, maintenance, project management, architectural services and other fields.

Anthem isn’t the only one hit by tougher conditions.

Today, Fletcher Building chief executive Ross Taylor revealed how that business was enduring harder house-building times lately too. Fletcher’s housing division made EBIT of $49m in the half-year to December 31, 2022, less than half the $112m previously.

The company expected a “softening” of residential markets to continue in 2024 here and in Australia.

“This lower activity is likely to reduce volumes in our materials and distribution businesses by circa 10 per cent to 15 per cent compared to what we have seen in the first half of the current year,” Taylor warned the markets today.

So that means sales of products like insulation, wallboard, roof products, cement and other categories the company makes and distributes are falling.

That is hitting its bottom line so it told the market today, rather than waiting till Wednesday when the result was originally scheduled to be revealed.

Stats NZ said this month new dwelling consents fell 7.2 per cent in December, after being up 7 per cent in November.

Consents were issued for 49,538 new homes in the year to December.

The seasonally-adjusted number of new homes consented fell 8.5 per cent in the quarter ending in December after rising 0.9 per cent in the September 2022 quarter.

Today, Stats NZ said that in the December 2022 quarter, the volume of ready-mixed concrete produced was 1.17 million cubic metres, down 9.0 per cent compared with the record December 2021 quarter.