One of the many things that really puzzles me about South Africans is their proclivity to insist on fixing things that aren't broken.

They seem to do so in the guise of being an entrepreneurial enterprise, but all they actually really want to do is make a quick buck.

One of the prime examples of this is the building industry. In South Africa we build with bricks and mortar. There are many good reasons for this: Clay is plentiful, labour is generally cheap (although these days wasteful), the cement supplies are adequate and we are geologically stable.

Earthquakes don't often happen here and any tremors might, at worst, cause surface cracks on the walls of a house unless you live in Carletonville where, as a result of mining activity, the consequences of a tremor might be worse.

Yet, repeatedly people try to introduce new building systems to a country that frankly doesn't want them, doesn't need them and won't buy them. Bricks and mortar are the stuff that South African houses are built from: anything else is viewed as sub-standard. The buyers are the ones that dictate that: not the engineers, the architects or the specifiers.

And we keep seeing new building systems being imported, then failing to gain any significant market share or acceptance from buyers and then gradually winding in relative obscurity. Why? Because these "entrepreneurs" are trying to fix, or at least amend, a system that is not broken.

I remember in the early 1980s writing stories about timber-framed housing and the advantages it purportedly offered the buyers. In truth, all that happened was that the few people who did invest in timber-frame didn't make as much money as they might have done when the property was later sold.

More recently the lightweight steel frame construction method has been available to willing buyers. From a housing perspective this system has achieved little (although it might be just as good as bricks and mortar) and it will take years for South Africans to invest their money in steel frame rather bricks and mortar.

The picture's slightly different with roof trusses though. More and more houses are using steel trusses because they are cheaper, easier to handle and can be assembled on site. There's a need for the product and buyers will buy it.

In the housing market I have come across homes built from tyres encased in sand and cement; or structural walls in a home made using formwork and shuttering to support a sand and cement mixture until it hardens into a wall.

I have also seen aluminium cans stacked on layers of mud, which is then encased in cement. Allegedly the can acts as a kind of reinforced steel within the cement, apparently making it many times stronger than a brick structure.

But the one thing that every importer of every new building system seems to forget is the simple fact that people don't want a new building system. They want houses made from bricks and mortar.

Invariably these alternative building systems actually originate in other countries and there are specific reasons for the development and use. In New Zealand for instance, where earthquakes occur regularly, brick houses are banned and only timber or steel frame building methods are allowed.

Earthquakes are the reason that people there want framed houses and who can blame them when the ground shivers and shakes, the tea cups clatter from the cupboards but the framed house doesn't fall down.

My own opinion is that we should forget about alternative building systems in South Africa. Rather, we need some entrepreneurial individual to improve the building practices on site.

Labour is the primary cost factor in a building project and unfortunately the general standard of labour in South Africa ranges somewhere between "hopelessly poor" and "abysmal".

In fact, South Africa's building practices on site must rate as some of the most inefficient in the world. Day after day you see the workers ambling around a building site pushing a wheelbarrow with the same enthusiasm that a child swallows his cod liver oil.

You see workers mixing cement with a shovel and a hosepipe and a bad attitude.

Everywhere you look there are dozy individuals with bloodshot eyes doing tedious, rather primitive manual labour tasks ranging from tossing bricks from the ground to the first floor or chipping plaster off bricks with a cold chisel and a hammer.

There's almost no automation and certainly no imperative to get the work done quickly and efficiently. To get the job done now.

So it's hardly surprising that it takes between six and nine months to build an average house and more than a month to complete a pondokkie that's little than a 40sqm box.

I remember writing about a house, built in the 1950s by members of one of the Master Builders Associations in South Africa. It was a standard three-bed roomed home, with a single bathroom, a living room, dining room and kitchen.

They built it in a week. From the foundations to the roof, including the electricity, the plumbing connections and even installing the built-in cupboards in bedrooms, the bathroom and the kitchen.

The structure itself took one day to erect. And that was in the 1950s.

Nowadays, it seems, we can't even build a dream in that time.

With all our technological advances our building systems are even more inefficient now than they were in the past. And the consequence of this mass inefficiency is that South Africans are paying much too much to build a house.

What we need to implement is a system based on payment on achievement rather than its current form of "paying for pitching up and being there".

Workers must get their money when they have achieved something constructive. Not before – and not as a part payment either.

The only power that owners have is the power to pay or not pay. That they must exercise. If the work isn't done (or isn't done properly), don't pay. That's it.

I really do think that now, when the property market is in the doldrums and workers are losing jobs, we need to take hold of our building industry by the scruff of its scraggly neck, turn it upside down, shake it around and start again.

Because as it stands, our building industry is probably the most inefficient and unproductive sector of our economy. The property owners and investors are paying for this inefficiency.

And we're paying at the tune of about R7k a square metre or more.

That's a lot of money spent on inefficiency and idleness.

*Hartdegen writes a regular column for Property24.com. The content of his columns constitutes his personal opinion and doesn't pretend to be facts or advice. Contact him at paddy@neomail.co.za.

Readers' Comments
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I fully agree with these comments, and wish to add that, the average buyer also ends up paying for all of the side jobs that most of the builders do that require materials like cement, bricks etc. All taken from your site. - Keith Bradley

Many construction projects are dictated to by government policy of employing local labour. Generally speaking, contractors are discouraged from the use of mechanization which would speed the process up as this would reduce the number of people required (and being paid) to complete the task. – Gill Nevin

The labour issue raised by the author is exactly the motivation for the alternate building methods he seems to despise. Brining an element of pre fabrication into the industry is just what is needed to increase quality and control construction times. To say that the only real reason to use timber or steel frame is the earthquake threat found in other countries is to ignore the obvious benefits associated with their construction. There is a clear correlation between construction time and the ultimate cost of the dwelling. Labour is a variable cost, dependant directly on the time worked by the construction team. Bricklaying, whilst it could certainly be sped up on most sites, is by its very nature a time consuming process. I agree that most South Africans desire a brick house but this perception has in the past been built upon the fact that in our country, labour was cheap. This is no longer the case, cost of construction has sky rocketed, both the materials cost and the labour cost. With these costs at new levels people are looking for simpler, cheaper ways to construct their homes. Consider that to build a steel frame house would not only save in brick layer time but also in the earthworks on the site and the laying of foundations as 8 footings would be sufficient to anchor an average 3 bedroom home.

The author should more carefully consider this topic before dismissing it out of hand, houses shouldn't cost R7000/m2 – perhaps the problem is that our suspicion of other building methods is the very reason for the lack of active competition in our construction industry.

Simon – 27, looking to build his first home, maybe in brick... but probably not.