The 50-Year View: Why Construction ID Wants to Follow a Building for Its Whole Life

Every conversation about construction lands in the same place: buildings cost too much, take too long, and too often arrive with a list of defects attached. We blame materials, labour and interest rates. But when I sat down with Justin Williams, founder of Construction ID by Wiseworking for The Proptech Podcast, he made the case that a big slice of the cost is far more mundane. It is admin. It is lost information. It is people redoing work that was already done.

The problem hiding in plain sight

Construction ID has done research with Deakin University on rework – fixing things that were already built, already fixed, or already entered into a system once. Justin says it accounts for between 10 and 13 per cent of a building's costs across its lifespan. More than a tenth of what we pay for a building may be going into doing things twice.

The reason is structural rather than lazy. Information is scattered across the phases of a building's life and the roles involved: the designer has one set of tools, the tenderer another, the builder another, the owners corporation another again. Each stores its data in its own software and database, then hands a partial version to whoever comes next. Justin describes the daily reality as hunting for "that golden email" – wading through inboxes and switching between apps to find something that someone, somewhere, already knew.

Everyone has felt this. Few have priced it.

One record, all the phases

Justin's elevator pitch is unusually clear about the ambition.

"A building consists of multiple phases that may span over 50 years. Software currently services a single phase of the building."

Construction ID services all of them – design, tendering, construction, then operations – as one central platform for the building's team. It is not just communication and file storage. It is document and quality control: it produces the forms a builder must complete, such as the inspection test record proving the plastering in a room was installed correctly.

The commercial logic is what I keep thinking about. Because information stays in one place, migrating and rebuilding data between stages is avoided, along with the miscommunication, data entry errors and lost records that come with it. Because every stage isn't buying its own point solution and building the cost into a tender price, software costs come down. And the developer gets a real-time view of the build, hearing about a delay or overrun early enough to act.

Justin is careful about how that visibility should feel. It isn't there so someone can be penalised. It's so problems are dealt with as a team before they harden into cost.

Wiseworking started in 2011, first on building defects, then occupational health and safety, then post-construction. Construction ID pulled that intellectual property together, with the build beginning during the COVID lockdowns. It is modular, which is why the client list runs from Cbus Property to Burbank Australia on Victorian residential projects. It doesn't care what the finished building looks like; what it automates is the process.

Follow the money, not just the pain

The moment that genuinely shifted my thinking came when Justin explained who he sells to.

"Rather than a two-year involvement, we're looking for a 50-year involvement."

That long view pushes the sale past the builder and subcontractors to the developer — and, he says, sometimes the financier or insurer. They carry the risk across the whole life of the asset and need to know their investment is protected.

This is a lesson proptech has been slow to learn. We spend enormous energy telling end users their process is painful and that we have a solution, and they nod politely and carry on. Money is a better argument. If the financier or insurer asks for a process to prevent a cost blowout, it gets implemented.

Why this matters here

Justin put the consequence bluntly: "the way we construct currently is making our properties unaffordable."

Australia is trying to build more homes, faster, in an industry where insolvencies are common and margins thin, while governments reasonably add legislation to protect consumers. But layering compliance onto a broken, largely manual process pushes more pressure onto the humans expected to deliver it — faster, smarter and cheaper at once. That is where much of the risk to consumers comes from.

Justin's view is that construction's digital journey has barely started, because so far we have mostly replicated what exists rather than improved it. The next step is data doing preventative work: interrogating a building's history so a recurring defect is forecast and designed out instead of patched again. As he put it, "data can be used to actually prevent a lot of issues occurring in the first place."

The reflection

The line I keep returning to wasn't about technology. Asked what he had learned, Justin talked about building a system, not just a solution: if a client asks for A, B and C, work out what D is.

That is the discipline construction needs: not another point solution bolted onto a broken sequence, but a system carrying information from the first drawing to the fiftieth year. Wouldn't it be something if, five years from now, construction costs had held steady while we produced more — not by squeezing the people in the process, but by letting the data do work it was always capable of?

More from this episode: read the show notes or read the full transcript.