For the fourth year running, construction industry leaders convened at Sydney Build to discuss pressing challenges and emerging opportunities in the sector, with a particular focus on navigating market uncertainties, managing supply chain disruptions and increased technology adoption. 

As the construction sector steadies itself after years of disruption, four industry leaders took to the stage at Sydney Build Expo to reflect on the path forward—one defined less by rapid expansion and more by resilience and recalibration. 
 
Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, skilled labour shortages and rising pressure to digitise, the panellists shared how their businesses are navigating complexity through increasingly tailored strategies in keeping with a deeper investment in technology.  
 
The panel discussion coincided with the release of the fourth edition of the Construction League. The report ranks the nation’s top 50 construction firms based on the total value of projects commenced in the past year, focusing on the commercial, community, industrial, legal & military and multi-residential sectors. The rankings provide insights into the total number of projects, the total project value and the average project value of each firm.   

Paul David, National Head of New Business and Strategy at Hutchinson Builders; Andy Rampton, Industry Transformation Leader at Procore, Nick Gaudry, General Manager at Urban Property Group and Ashleigh Pattison, Director of Project Content APAC at Hubexo, joined a candid conversation on where the construction industry is heading—and how the past few years of disruption have sparked a fundamental rethink across development, delivery and technology.  

The collective takeaway? While labour, cost and uncertainty continue to bite, this is an industry preparing for its next phase—with new systems, smarter tools and a sharper focus on where value can be created.  

Gaudry: Planning reform and systems-driven growth  

For Gaudry, the year has been about gearing up—strategically.  

“The first part of the year has been responding to government planning reform”, he said, noting the opportunity this presented for their growth. “We’ve already had two successful projects that we’ve applied for and gained additional apartments through that Housing Development Authority and State Significant Developments.”  

Internally, the company has focused on scaling construction capability.  

“Our construction team has been heavily focused on laying the foundation to an upscale of the business… a big part of that foundation has been introducing a lot of systems to ensure we can grow at scale.”  

Platforms like Procore and HammerTech have been implemented to support that growth trajectory and by year’s end, the business will have grown its active projects from two to eight. But for Gaudry, growth is about more than volume—it’s about evolution.  

“We’ve also added a lot of NDIS, special needs housing to our portfolio”, he said. “It’s changed how we build, what we’re building is a very integrated response.”  
 
Gaudry also said Urban Property Group is leaning further into prefabrication and modular construction to counter ongoing labour shortages, prioritising long-term efficiency over short-term cost savings. 

Urban Property Group placed 30th in this year’s Construction League with 3 project commencements in 2024, at a combined value of $258 million. 

David: Hutchies resets around certainty—and data  

For Paul David, National Head of New Business and Strategy at Hutchinson Builders, 2025 has marked a necessary recalibration.  

“We saw 2025 when we set the strategy for this year as a year of reset. There was so much disruption… and there’s nothing worse in our game than uncertainty.”  

Construction, he stressed, requires long-term confidence. “When we set off on a project, we’re building it for somewhere between 12 months to three or four years. But we acknowledge that our clients are taking a five or ten-year view.”  

To drive better decisions, Hutchies has doubled down on analytics. “We started a big data drive in our organisation… telling us what we did well, what we don’t do well and how to fix that.” That led to a data-informed strategy around project size, sector and geography.  

“This has increased our profitability this year by about 300%”, David said.  

But challenges remain—particularly labour.  

“We don’t believe we’re getting fair migration… Our industry represents about 10% of the Australian workforce but our migration is limited to about 2%.” He warned of a structural supply issue: “We’re just not training enough apprentices”.  

And without a solution, costs will continue to rise. “We’re going to start to see 6% to 7%, 8% per annum in cost increase and that will be driven by labour—not necessarily materials.”  

Hutchinson Builders placed 4th in this year’s Construction League with 53 project commencements in 2024, at a combined value of $1.73 billion. 

Pattison: Hubexo’s vision for smarter construction 

“We’re looking into things like predictive data and how unique that is to our industry, and how our customers can also leverage that in their day-to-day operations”, Ashleigh Pattison, Director of Project Content at Hubexo said. 
 
“Speaking with Andy earlier, we both agreed that a lot of change management is needed for businesses to adopt these types of technologies and best practices.” 

Looking ahead, Pattison said the remainder of 2025 will be defined by a push for those in the construction industry to modernise the way they engage with data—from access and interpretation to meaningful application. 

“We are rebranding as Hubexo—one global team, one global company—and that’s going to bring a lot of opportunities to our data”, she said.  

That means more accurate, more predictive and more efficiently delivered insights for clients using platforms like LeadManager and Analytix. 

“BCI Central’s annual Construction League report wouldn’t be possible without the relationships that we have in the industry”, she said. “We’re highly confident in saying that we have strong partnerships… They’re coming to us and saying we see the benefit of partnering with Hubexo or BCI and leveraging that synergy.”  

Pattison also highlighted a 22% increase in subcontractor data points captured in the last quarter alone. “We love data”, she said. “We’re in the information age—data is king.”  

Rampton: Construction is strong—but weird  

Andy Rampton, Industry Transformation Leader at Procore, didn’t shy away from what he called the “weirdness” of the current moment in construction.  

“If you look at the headline numbers, construction appears to be a really healthy industry. There’s lots of pipeline, lots of opportunity, lots of growth.  

“There is certainly a lot of demand coming down the pipe. The weirdness is that it is not resulting in the long overdue digital transformation of the industry. 

“It’s a real strange place that you know, despite the advances we’re making around data and technology, the industry itself is not shifting as we need to get a better place.” 

Despite the tools available, the reality is many projects are still running off Excel spreadsheets.  
 
“We see the same challenges everywhere—even well-funded projects struggle with data and tech strategy. Australia stacks up fairly well, though BIM adoption is behind the US and UK, largely due to weaker regulation and a lack of government mandates”, Rampton said. 

Despite advances in technology and process, the core pressures facing construction remain stubbornly familiar. 

“It’s still a 5% margin industry. It’s not becoming more profitable. It still has massive challenges… The sheer ability to manage the scale of risk across the industry is not fundamentally changing from where it was a generation ago.”  

That said, Rampton sees promise in one key area: AI.  

“We think AI is going to be the thing that drives this long overdue digital transformation of the industry.”  

Explore the latest rankings of Australia’s top builders in this year’s Construction League. Take a deeper dive by downloading the report now.