B for build
Home Construction Limited has become a Certified B Corporation, which means an independent assessor has measured how the company treats people and the planet, not just how it performs financially.
New Zealand has more than 500 Certified B Corporations. Now one of them builds houses.
Founded in 2011, Home Construction is a full-service nationwide construction company that’s part of the Christchurch-based Home Foundation Group. Certification took two and a half years and ran to an 80-page application, with every answer backed by documentary evidence.
Joining B Corp means joining a global community of businesses that have agreed to be measured on how they treat people and the planet, not only on profit.
“Based on a search of B Lab’s public directory, we’re confident we’re the first full-service construction company in New Zealand to achieve certification,” says Josh Milne, design and innovation lead at Home Construction.
“How we work matters – how we look after our people, how we treat our build partners, suppliers and the environment. There are already Certified B Corporations doing great work here across food, retail, professional services, tourism and manufacturing, and joining that group is less about the logo and more evidence that a construction company can benefit all its stakeholders and still be competitive.”
A nationwide business, it operates as part of the Christchurch-based Home Foundation Group.
B Corp certification is run by B Lab, a global non-profit with an Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand office. It assesses an entire company, not a single product or project, across five areas: governance, workers, community, environment, and customers, with the points on offer in each tailored to a company’s size, sector and location.
“This independent, evidence-based assessment gave us a B Impact™ Score of 148.9, against the 80 points needed to certify,” says Josh. “Our strongest area was Environment, at 53.9, which matters in an industry that generates around half of New Zealand’s waste to landfill. More than 75% of our on-site waste was recycled or reused, and more than 90% of our developments are on brownfield land rather than greenfield.”
Chief executive Paul Nanai says the company pursued certification because it was independent and hard to get.
“We wanted an independent check because most of what businesses say about their values is self-reported, including plenty of what we’ve said about ourselves over the years. We wanted our own claims to hold up against something more than our own word, which is why we started the B Corp process two and a half years ago.
“Construction has a history of being a hard industry, on the people in it, and on the places it works. We don’t accept that as the cost of doing business. We wanted someone outside this company to test whether what we say about how we operate actually holds up. It did. It also showed us where we’ve still got work to do, and that’s the part we found most useful.”
