01 — LAYOUT
Arranged
One box or several — a studio, a two-bedroom, or a small cluster. The intent: every join drawn once and certified once.
Units.nz — Early-stage venture
Reinventing
Reinventing
the box.
Units.nz is an early-stage New Zealand venture setting out to make radically affordable, transportable modular buildings possible — one certified unit, designed to the building code and repeated faithfully.
We haven't built a unit yet. We're assembling the design, the certification pathway, and the partners to do it properly — and we'd like to do it with you.
CONCEPT
INDICATIVE
NOT TO SCALE
The problem
New Zealand's housing is unaffordable — and it starts with how we build.
The usual story blames land and zoning. The quieter, larger story is logistics and standardisation: a small, remote market that imports most of its materials, builds almost every home as a one-off, and underbuilds the small, affordable homes people most need.
~8×
household income to buy a median home.
Anything above five times income is "severely unaffordable" on the international scale. Most of the country sits well past that line.
~90%
of core building materials are imported.
Priced in other currencies and exposed to global freight — every disruption abroad becomes a cost on a New Zealand build.
~10%
of new homes are built offsite — against up to 80% abroad.
We build one-off, even though prefab already runs cheaper and faster. Every bespoke house re-pays the cost of figuring it out from scratch.
120k
new one-person households in a decade — but only ~40k new one-bedroom homes.
The market underbuilds the small, independent homes single people, couples, and downsizers actually need.
Our focus
Radically affordable, transportable buildings.
Our plan isn't a catalogue of houses. It's a single modular unit — a transportable box designed to the code — varied by how it's arranged, how it's clad, and what it's used for. One envelope; many lives. Standardise the box, and you attack the real cost: the friction around it.
02 — SKIN
Clad
Cladding, colour, and roof change how a unit reads without touching the structural shell beneath.
03 — FUNCTION
Fitted out
A home, a studio, a clinic, a classroom, a respite unit — one structural envelope, a menu of interiors.
Target specification — indicative
Base module
3.0 m wide
Design life
50 years
Code pathway
B1–H1
Siting
Transportable
Where we're headed
Consent-exempt to start. Certified and stackable in time.
We plan to start with transportable units under consent-exempt rules. The work ahead is a BRANZ assurance mark on the repeatable box and, ultimately, a consented, stackable, multi-storey unit. The box is the floor, not the ceiling.
Let's work together
We want to build this with partners.
Certifier, factory, supplier, insurer, wholesale buyer, or installer — if you want to help make radically affordable housing real in New Zealand, we'd like to share where we're headed and hear your thinking. Early conversations welcome.
CertificationFactories & supplyWholesaleInsurance & financeBuilders & installers
build@units.nz