Australia’s largest homebuilder Metricon held its national conference in Tasmania’s capital Hobart this week, with calls from company heads for its designers to imagine ‘loving where you live for the next 10 years’

After a turbulent year, Metricon was at one stage being written of, supposedly on the brink of collapse last year and facing sustained questions surrounding its financial health after several builders collapsed across the country.

These fears began to surface in the market after the sudden death of the company’s founder and CEO Mario Biasin in May 2022.

But pull back from the brink it did, with Metricon’s owners injecting $30 million of new capital into the business in a show of confidence to the market, while also cutting almost 10 percent of its workforce.

That seemed to have down the trick, so for the 2022/23 financial year, Metricon reported 4,693 home building starts across Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia, somewhat down from about 6,000 homes the previous year, but still putting the home builder in good stead for the future.

This national conference, known as Mod 24, was all about reinvigorating and reassuring the company’s employees that it’s not just business as usual, but its time for its nearly-2500 employees, "to reimagine the future of the Aussie home."

Image: Supplied

As Adrian Popple, Design Director at Metricon said in his opening address at the event: “Sensational and amazing architecture has inspired me, and that now was the time to start focusing more on how “We can design our homes to last the test of time.”

In a rallying cry directed squarely at the Metricon design team and Metricon’s competitors, Popple said it was high time the market saw “Why we are so good and why you don’t want to mess with us”.

So, it seems the turbulence of the past has been put behind, and it’s the challenges of the futures that now occupy the minds of Metricon’s management team.

CEO Brad Duggan notes the recent decision by the Reserve Bank to keep interest rates on hold is a positive sign for the industry.

Above image: Metricon CEO Brad Duggan / Supplied

“It makes me happy,” Duggan says, adding that, “maybe there are other solutions to look at to manage inflation”.

Overall, the general vibe from Australia’s largest home builder, a title it’s held for eight years running was that, regardless of any economic fluctuations, the future decade at least was looking positive for the company.

Main Image: The Riviera / Metricon

Branko Miletic

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