Surfers Paradise-based Pivotal Homes, formerly a sponsor of the Gold Coast Titans, was liquidated on Thursday, according to a report from The Australian. Cleveland-based Solido Builders, which specialized in custom luxury homes, also went into liquidation. In the past 18 months, a number of home construction companies have collapsed, including other small construction companies in Queensland, such as Besse Construction, to major companies such as Condev, Probuild and Pindan. The founder of Solido, John Hattink, said that rising labor and material costs were affecting all builders.
A luxury Queensland builder specializing in home renovations has become the latest victim of the conga line of collapsed builders. The executive director of Master Builders Australia, Denita Wawn, who led the case for a stimulus program, defended payments. With little additional capacity to carry out the projects they had signed on, the builders had to carry out work waiting to begin and that became more expensive to complete with each passing month, Mr. Stephens said.
Russ Stephens, co-founder of the Professional Builders Association, told The Australian that the fact that Pivotal Homes and Solido had committed to paying all subcontractors in full showed that they had decided to “fall for the sword” with the calculated calculation that companies could not continue viably in today's market. This involves the participation of banks, pre-insolvency advisors and liquidators appointed by builders to fraudulently defeat creditors. Metricon, the country's largest homebuilder, also began asking customers to pay more, but abandoned the initiative after the QBCC informed consumers that they were not required to do so. Queensland homebuilder Oracle, which went into liquidation on Wednesday, rebounded thanks to the federal government's HomeBuilder plan and in one year quadrupled its number of home construction contracts compared to the previous year, records show.
It's not just about builders going broke, but companies across Australia liquidate every day for a variety of reasons.
