Red Stag, which operates New Zealand’s largest sawmill and cross-laminated timber factory in Rotorua, has snapped up Auckland’s TimberLab Solutions for an unspecified amount.
East Tamaki-based TimberLab, owned for the past 64 years by the McIntosh family, works with glue laminated timber (Glulam), laminated veneer lumber (LVL) and CLT engineered timber solutions.
Red Stag chief executive Marty Verry said discussions for buying into the firm started last year while working on a timber-only residential initiative at Clearwater. The combined firms, which will employ about 60 people, will be rebranded Red Stag TimberLab.
Verry said the purchase brings the “missing pieces” of a puzzle that Red Stag has been building over the past two decades and will help the firm jump-start a growth path by combining two very capable teams and bringing on board a significant level of institutional knowledge in the mass timber space.
TimberLab has a strong pipeline of current work across NZ’s private sector and with the government and social housing provider Kāinga Ora, as well as into Australia, the Pacific and the Middle East.
“It means building designers and developers will be able to work with a single source for the entire building structure and benefit from early supplier engagement to fully optimise the engineering of wooden structures.”
Verry said the group is seeing strong uptake of mass timber, driven by the desire by the government and private developers to address climate change and build sustainably.
“The property sector is starting to recognise the damage caused by high-emission building materials such as steel and concrete, and take a lead in doing something about it.”
He said imminent climate change regulation will also require buildings to measure and reduce their embodied carbon emissions, which make up an estimated 10% of NZ’s emissions.
Helping with the transition to timber, Verry said, is the recent escalation in the price of steel, which has increased 58% in the past two years.
