DIY giant Bunnings is branching out further into making and selling prefabricated walls and roof trusses, ramping up its investment in local manufacturing as it looks beyond pure hardware retail.

The Wesfarmers-owned hardware chain has poured $75 million into three automated “frame and truss” plants over a two-year period, with a new location set to open in the Brisbane suburb of Wacol next year, bringing its sixth site online.

The investment comes as Bunnings angles to play a bigger role in residential construction at a time when it says builders are demanding pre-fabricated products that can be delivered directly to their sites.

“They’re time poor, they need efficiency - it is harder and harder to get skilled labour on site, and it’s getting more expensive,” the chief operating officer of Bunnings’ commercial business, Ben McIntosh, said.

“Builders are finding it harder to attract tradies, the price of labour is going up. Anything you can do to help builder get things up faster, more efficiently…[it’s] what the customer is demanding.”

Loading

The group says it can build frames for builders of all sizes that are working on residential projects including houses, town houses and low-rise apartments.

Earnings growth at Bunnings came in at just 1.2 per cent for the 2023 financial year, hitting $2.3 billion, but Wesfarmers boss Rob Scott and Bunnings chief executive Mike Schneider were both upbeat about the long-term outlook for the company when discussing the group’s full-year financial results last month.

Australia’s residential construction market is facing a slew of challenges including rising labour costs, inflation and interest rate increases.