As the deadline for HomeBuilder grants approaches, the boost to Wagga's building industry is set to be felt in the months to come.
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Next Wednesday is the deadline for the program, aimed at encouraging construction in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
From June last year, $25,000 grants were available for building contracts for new homes worth $750,000 or less and substantial renovations on homes with a value of $1.5 million or less pre-renovation.
In November the scheme was extended at a lower level of $15,000, with the new build threshold increased to $950,000.
Wagga builder Glenn Maslin said the introduction of the grants meant the past year had been busy with plenty of budding homeowners taking advantage of the money.
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"For a year we thought was going to be more doom and gloom, it's gone the other way with the grant, the government's created this big surge no-one expected," he said.
"It's brought forward a lot of clients who were expecting to build in say two years' time, they've all gone forward and decided to do the construction now."
Mr Maslin said the reduction from $25,000 grants to $15,000 had slowed the surge down somewhat, but his company was still seeing plenty of inquiries and doing up quotes with many contracts signed since Christmas.
A caveat of the HomeBuilder grants is that the construction on the home must commence within six months of the contract being signed.
Mr Maslin said this meant the industry would be hard at work in the months to come.
"All the builders have got a fair bit of pressure on themselves to keep up ... they're mainly having trouble with trades, with workers because all the trades are so busy that you can't get them when you need them."
He said this also meant there was pressure on suppliers to keep up with demand, with products like framing pine and steel starting to become scarce.
While the physical construction side of things will be seeing the effects of the HomeBuilder surge for a while, Mr Maslin said he expected the end of the grant would cause a drop in pace for new contracts.
"I expect there's going to be a lull in the market, it'd be nice for it to keep rolling as it is and Wagga seems to keep going forward," he said.
With supply and worker shortages a risk in coming months however, he said a lull could help the industry.
"I don't think its going to be too bad a thing for it to slow down a little bit ... so everyone can catch a breath and sort of sort out the material issues and obviously all the building that's going on," he said.
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