A designer looking to build houses for countries across the South Pacific wants a bit of help from the Tauranga City Council to smooth the paper work.

Chris Bauchli's company EarthCube makes houses out of retired shipping containers.

In a talk during the public forum before the council's projects and monitoring committee meeting this week, Chris said he's got a market for them in Rarotonga, Vanuatu and other Pacific Basin countries, and he wants to build them for other New Zealand centres.

He says Kiwibank and Housing New Zealand are working together to fund relocateable and modular design housing and this is an opportunity for him.

Instead of obtaining a separate building consent for each building, Chris wants to work with council planning staff to develop a consent process for the method, so he can build certified designs with a flexible design base that will be acceptable to other New Zealand municipalities.

His stated intention is to build the houses on the former benchmark site at Sulphur Point and ship or truck them about the country.

He wants to be Tauranga based. He's got a yard near the port – the source of a constant stream of retired containers, which are usually retired by their insurers after 8-10 years at sea.

He was told by Mayor Stuart Crosby the council staff will be happy to work with him on the process, and there are changes looming in the building code that are close to what Chris is talking about.