QBuild Remote Housing Program

Developer	QBuild
Clients	AUSCO, Fleetwood and Saltair
Location	Regional and remote Queensland, including Toowoomba, Dalby, Winton, Longreach, St George, Injune, Roma, Rockhampton, Proserpine, Charleville and Ingham
Solution	The Helical Pile
Scale	Foundations delivered for 60 of 100 modular homes across regional Queensland; over 1,000 piles installed to date
Timeframe	Since 2023, ongoing

The Stake

This program delivers social and emergency responder housing across regional and remote Queensland on a tight Queensland Government budget, in towns where the ground itself works against a standard build: the further inland, the more reactive the clay, with soil that can shrink and swell down to five metres below the surface and shift a house that isn’t properly founded against it.

The Challenge

Concrete was the original design, but remote availability and cost made it impractical: contractors were reporting concrete running as high as $2,000 a cubic metre in some of these towns, on top of the reactive soil profile that meant a standard footing risked real movement in the building above it. With a fixed government budget and homes needed across dozens of dispersed sites, the program couldn’t afford a foundation approach that was slow, expensive or one-size-fits-all.

The Approach

Every pile is designed against the geotechnical and soil profile of its own site, not a single template repeated across the state, because a design that holds in one town’s clay won’t necessarily hold in the next. Mobilisation requires only a truck, an excavator, and a crew of three or four, which is what makes it practical to move between remote sites at all. That combination has made screw piles around 40% quicker than concrete on average. On the Toowoomba builds, for example, screw piles had the site completed in two days, compared with three to four for the concrete equivalent originally specifie

“We did the screw piles in two or three days per stage, and rain didn’t stop us. Concrete delays didn’t affect us. It just de-risks everything.”

Toby Johns,

Operations Manager, Saltair Modular

The Outcome

Homes have gone up across towns from Longreach to Ingham on budget and without the reactive soil movement that concrete would have risked, including two-storey staff accommodation for hospital workers at Ingham, built on the same program. Over 1,000 piles are in the ground so far, with more rounds of the program still to come.