Building code

Yeah.

Um, where indoor temperatures are hitting 35 degrees C, and why MBIE's decision to delay building code fixes until 2031 has sparked outrage from building experts.

And third, with holiday planning underway, we look at NetSafe's warning on fake holiday rental listings, AI-generated property scams, and the critical payment red flags you need to spot.

So let's jump straight into segment number one, the downsizing bottleneck and missing supply for older homeowners.

Mm.

There's architectural flaws across modern medium-density developments, and I find it actually quite weird that it's, they're not gonna even look at this until 2031.

I mean, people are already finding that, you know, 35 degrees, that's ridiculous, and if your front door's getting to 50, 60 degrees, why isn't that being looked at now? Because we're obviously doing too much, um, and I think a lot of people are thinking, "Well, I must comply with this and all the building codes and healthy homes, et cetera," and some buildings don't need it to that scale.

Mm.

Navigating market pauses does require pretty careful planning though.

Taking shortcuts on your property projects can lead to far bigger headaches as highlighted by a recent story on prefab cabins and building code compliance.

Which is topic number three from Stuff.

On the 23rd of September, pensioner's kit set cabin doesn't meet building code, according to the company that sold it.

A 67-year-old pensioner bought an $11,900 prefab container cabin with a kitchen and a bathroom from West Auckland supplier Easy to Build, Blue Ocean International, for family visits, paying an additional $700 for pile foundations.

The structure arrived with severe defects.

Foundations were improperly installed, causing the unit to bounce and sink 25 millimetres.

Silicon sealant peeled off, the bathroom window almost fell out in high winds, and the door lacked an external lock.

So a tiny percent still.

But with the climate crisis, with these growing concerns into the future, we expect building codes will continue to become more stringent.

Every couple of years has been new building codes come out, inching us closer and closer to net zero over time.

So in the coming decades, net zero hopefully will become the standard for all construction in the future.

Now, in terms of net zero for the operational carbon, the power, I see that seems doable.

But the latest one is not only a problem, its so-called solution has been delayed.

So MBIE is working on the overheating issues, right? But any changes are not going to be part of the 28 Building Code review.

In fact, overheating won't be dealt with until 2031.

Stephen McNeil is a senior building physicist at the Building Research Association and is with us.

I just find it hard to believe we're building these sort of buildings and, you know, forget the rules.

Why are we building houses that overheat in 2026?

Well, fundamentally, we don't actually look for overheating risk during building code, sort of during building compliance or any building code assessments.

So it's really that we've been focused so much on trying to keep heat in for winter, obviously, and then trying to build more dense buildings.

Building officials say comprehensive changes to fix overheating in new houses won't be looked at until the building code is reviewed in 2031.

Advocates are dismayed there won't be a fix for years, saying the dangerous problem is only getting worse as temperatures rise.

Our climate change correspondent Kate Newton filed this report.

Ceiling fans, a noisy portable AC unit.

foil-covered bubble wrap on the windows, and finally paying for ducted air conditioning.

Stephen McNeill, a senior physicist at the Building Research Association, or BRANS, says many people are finding themselves in Jared's predicament because there's nothing in the building code to control internal temperatures.

He says it will become even more of a problem as average temperatures increase.

But it's also those extremes and you've got things like El Nino and that that will become quite an issue.

So it, the, in that entire process is, you know, you've literally got a model showing, you've got, okay, so all these buildings in Florida are based there.

We, we know that that has, the building codes in that area that have improved substantially since, say, the 1980s.

So that means that the buildings that have been built after a certain point are much more robust.

So there's lots of considerations, and quite a lot of that will go into these models.

So it can be quite difficult to motivate people to do that, to build with the stronger roof tiles, to have less flammable materials, et cetera.

Government policy, I think in many studies, just has an enormous impact.

And that, that example of Florida building codes is a good one because, you know, the build- the, um, buildings that are built after a certain date withstand hurricanes so much better than other ones.

There's lots of good evidence, but it is not necessarily the most popular decision from a, from a, a local state or a local government from a po- politically.

And then you have this thing between the federal and the state government, which is the housing regulations.

So the Building Code of Australia 1975 basically sets out a framework, which then you have a whole series of regulations about how you're going to build.

Example, once upon a time, we didn't have smoke detectors in homes.

Then we had to have smoke detectors.