Mr and Mrs design-build
Lisa and Joe Bryne are both married to their business. Lisa designs, Joe builds. Itโs a highly successful partnership.
Lisa and Joe Bryne are both married to their business. Lisa designs, Joe builds. Itโs a highly successful partnership, on both the home front and Aucklandโs busy residential building sites.
Itโs unusual to see two people achieve close compatibility both in their personal relationship and chosen careers. But thatโs exactly what husband and wife Joe and Lisa Byrne have done.
Byrne Homes, based in the new Hibiscus Coast suburb of Millwater, has a mini-dream team in charge โ Lisa designs the interiors; Joeโs the Master Builder who oversees the building projects.
Itโs a highly efficient and productive combination, producing a multimillion-dollar turnover and seven to nine houses annually utilising contractor partnerships. For Joe, building is in the blood. His dad was a builder. Growing up Joe spent many a school holiday on the end of a hammer. But when he turned 16, his parentsโ ultimatum was: โbuilding site or university!โ
It was an easy decision, Joe recalls โ at uni he studied accounting and IT and later spent time managing a help-desk for an IT company. But studying didnโt come easy โ he was happiest when building things or pulling them apart. One day he decided heโd had enough โ it was back to the tools with his father.
Joe also met Lisa when he was 16, through mutual school friends. They were married six years later. Lisa wears the design hat for the business, having completed a design degree and several years working as a freelance designer for various magazines including NZ House & Garden and Anna Strettonโs Her Business, and as a freelance photographer. Today she is full-time looking after their children, aged nine and 12, and designing layouts, floorplans, kitchens, bathrooms and colour schemes for Byrne Homes. Joeโs building career has included time with four of New Zealandโs largest house build companies. Three-and-a-half years ago he made the decision to go it alone.
โIโm not very good at doing what Iโm told,โ he explains. โI have a lot of ideas and in the corporate world youโre just a small piece in the puzzle. My ideas werenโt valued the way I wanted them to be.โ Houses have almost become a commodity in the modern world, he adds. Itโs no longer the traditional lifetime investment โ itโs mostly about quick capital gain. He was sick of the โsame-old, same-oldโ; frustrated at the lack of build quality out there and lack of thought or clever design going into houses generally. Often it was simply a case of rooms facing in the wrong direction to capture the sun.
โWhen you hand over the keys to a new home owner, you want to be genuinely excited for them,โ Joe explains. So for Byrne Homes quality and design is paramount.
The coupleโs home in Millwater, which doubles as a show home and business office, is a home to get excited about. Finished to a high standard and with Lisaโs unique design stamp, it stands out amongst the neighbouring look-alikes. While most of their โdesign and buildโ enquiries come via word of mouth, theyโre hoping that by promoting the show home theyโll generate additional business both in and beyond Millwater.
Unique approach Lisa and Joe say their hands-on approach is quite unique in the market. Itโs not often the business owner is also project manager and potential builder who sees the build through from start to finish.
โThere are not many companies with their own in-house designer who gives the customer the time we do on design,โ says Joe, adding that they have a great relationship with a leading architect, which means between the three of them they produce some stunning concepts.
โWith all three of us so passionate about creating homes, we end up with some fabulous results,โ says Lisa.
Of course, building houses is not all plain sailing โ ever-present cashflow challenges can cause sleepless nights โ although Joe says creating a โcash-floatโ with the bank goes some way to easing the stress. However, moving to a model of using contractors rather than having employees has improved productivity, scalability and cashflow.
The next step is to take on a full-time project manager.
Securing the right clients is important too. Trust is important, explains Lisa. โPeople are entrusting you with all their money to build their home.โ โYouโre spending a year with these people,โ adds Joe. โSo it needs to be a really solid relationship.โ
An industry stretched Aucklandโs housing industry is stressed โ poor infrastructure and its sprawling geography are contributing factors, helping push build costs up. Itโs 20 percent more expensive to build in Auckland compared to Christchurch, says Joe. โIn Christchurch a truck may go from site to tip and back again in 15 minutes; in Auckland itโll take an hour and a half.โ
Heโd like to see more developments like Hobsonville where one building company can be responsible for a group of houses and everyoneโs on the same page. Economy of scale and efficiency literally goes through the roof.
As for the governmentโs plan to build 100,000 high quality, affordable homes over ten years, Joe and Lisa have serious doubts on whether itโs achievable, with labour and materials resources already stretched and the industry operating in a value-added vacuum. โThe countryโs still building houses exactly the way it always did, with the same labour content, so wages remain suppressed,โ explains Joe.
Meanwhile, at the time of writing the couple were waiting to hear if their threelevel show home had won an Auckland region medal in the 2018 Registered Master Builders House of the Year awards.
โWeโre hoping for a gold,โ says Lisa, โbut the competition is very tough this year. โLast year we won a gold and won the Auckland category.โ
Their home is on a difficult site but optimised for its view, and utilises innovative materials and techniques. โMost points will be scored on complexity and design,โ says Joe.
Looking ahead, the couple are aiming to be less โhands onโ โ more strategically focused, rather than operationally; so the business will continue to function normally if they take a family holiday. (Coincidentally, the week after NZBusiness called, they were about to take a well-earnt break in Fiji.)
โAs to whether I actually do achieve that or not โ thatโs the ideal world,โ says Joe. โBut Iโd love to be in the position where I can do it if I choose to.โ