Tauranga's booming building market is exposing a weakness in the system – the amount of time it takes Tauranga City Council to process building consent applications.

While city council staff still claim it takes 20 working days to process a building consent, moves are afoot to change a system that builders are telling SunLive can take two to three months.

The 20 working days is a legal obligation under the Resource Management Act.

'So we had one, eight weeks,” says one builder. 'They just keep coming back with questions, their way of getting around it, getting the run around.”

He's an experienced builder, well educated about the information required in a consent application.

'I'm not sure I want to be quoted. We have to deal with the inspectors on a daily basis. If they see something like that with my name in the paper then they make my life more difficult than they already do.

'It's ridiculous the amount of time it takes consents to come out, it's just ridiculous.”

The city's current system is to give an application a once over in the first 48 hours to ensure all the required paper work is included in the application.

The applicant, a builder, building company or architect is then emailed saying whether the consent application is accepted for further processing or not.

If during the 20 working day period there is a discovery of something that somehow missed the two day initial inspection, then the applicant will be contacted to provide it. The clock stops until the question is answered. Once the consent is issued it goes out the back for pricing.

'It is taking the TCC building Inspection department 25 working days just to think about maybe considering a set of plans for consent,” says one frustrated builder. 'Then it takes another 20-25 working days to process them.

'Building companies in this city are tearing their hair out trying to get the council motivated to process plans faster... God help any one of them if they raise the ire of the inspection department for should they have plans in for consideration, and they upset the Inspection department, the plans are just likely to accidentally slip to the bottom of the pile.”

'We are busy, we know that other building companies are busy,” says another builder. 'We know there is huge demand for land out there at present and it's being snapped up real quick.

'So it we know our designers are working all hours and the engineers are busy. Everything is taking longer than usual because the same amount of people can't do more than the same amount of work.

'It's not just council, designers and engineers are taking a bit longer as well, that's holding up processes as well.”

Some of the large companies contacted say they have already taken their concerns to the council with a couple being told changes are due next month.

One building company was told that building consents will be able to be lodged electronically from September.

But the city council says there will be no relief this year.

'We are currently working on a system that will allow customers to submit their building consents online. This project is still being developed and we expect it will be available in the first half of next year,” says Business Manager: Building, Tania Brittain.

The city council has seen a sharp increase in incoming consent numbers over recent months with the number of consents received by Tauranga City Council climbing to an average of 76 per week for June and July 2015, compared with 57 per week in April and May 2015.

'We've been working hard to improve our building consent processing timeframes. Our compliance in this area increased to 93.3 per cent in the six months to the end of July 2015, compared with 78.3 per cent for the same period in 2014,” says Tania.

The inspectors often need more information than is provided to process a building consent, says Tania. Any Request for Further Information the council makes is to ensure that the proposed building work complies with the Building Code, says Tania.

'To the end of July 2015, RFIs were required for 66 per cent of all consent applications we processed.”

Building consent application numbers have climbed considerably over recent years with total consents issued by Tauranga City Council increasing by around 30 per cent since 2011.

TOTAL AMOUNT OF BUILDING CONSENTS ISSUED BY YEAR:

• 2011 - 121,670
  
  
• 2012 - 131,785
  
  
• 2013 - 142,076
  
  
• 2014 - 152,177