Carlisle Homes

Developer	Carlisle Homes
Location	Victoria (metropolitan and regional)
Solution	The Helical Pile
Scale	Over 100,000 piles
Timeframe	Ongoing since FTA’s founding in 2012, 15+ years

The Stake

Carlisle Homes was one of FTA’s first two clients, on board from the very start of the business in 2012. Residential building contracts are fixed price: once signed, a builder can’t go back to the homeowner for a variation, so cost certainty on every trade, including foundations, sits with Carlisle from day on

The Challenge

Carlisle’s engineers flag screw piles as an option whenever a foundation is expected to run deeper than two metres, leaving Carlisle to choose between a bored pier and a screw pile on cost and logistics. That decision isn’t simple: the cheaper per-pile quote isn’t always the cheaper build. On knockdown-rebuild sites in established suburbs, foundation work also means running trucks and machinery past the neighbours for days at a time, and Carlisle is unusually conscious that today’s neighbour is tomorrow’s prospective customer.

The Approach

We install with a single mobilisation, piles in, crew out, rather than the multiple truck movements a bored pier needs for excavation, soil removal and concrete delivery, which matters on a street where Carlisle doesn’t want to be the trade that upsets the neighbours. On cost, we work within Carlisle’s own decision-making: they look past the per-pile price to total build cost, and will choose screw piles even at a few thousand dollars more if it means finishing three days sooner. Every job comes with full documentation of the site’s soil parameters, so the compliance risk Carlisle would carry with a less rigorous contractor isn’t something they have to think about.

The Outcome

Carlisle gets a foundation option it can weigh on the same commercial terms as any other trade decision, confident that the compliance groundwork is already done and that the crew on site won’t be the reason a neighbour complains. That’s sat behind a relationship stretching back to FTA’s first year in business, and over 100,000 piles installed for Carlisle since.