100 | Kershaw Builders BUILDING One good thing leads to another Kershaw Builders offers a full service to the client, from initial design right through to sign-off. T T Hugh de Lacy Repeat business is the best compliment a company can get, and Al Kershaw of Christchurch’s Kershaw Builders is basking in it in the form of one of his biggest houses yet. Kershaw Builders is well into the construction of 380m2 home for a dairy-farmer client on Ansons Road, Kirwee, half an hour west of Christchurch. The four-bedroom-and-study house sports solid timber cladding and polished concrete floors, as well as an architecturally designed kitchen and internal access garage. And the satisfying thing for Al is that he landed this plum project on the strength of his earlier build of a 200m2 beach-house at Lake Brunner on the West Coast for the same client. “Kershaw Builders gets most of its work by word of mouth, which is good in itself, but repeat work – and especially an upmarket build like Ansons Road – is the icing on the cake,” Al says. “We mainly do residential work, especially new house builds, but we’ll take on anything from a semi-commercial project to a deck or a fence, and everything in between. “We’ll build whatever you like, from a matchbox to a mansion – in fact anything the client brings us.” Kershaw Builders offers a full service to the client, from initial design right through to sign-off, making it as stress-free a process as possible. Al himself is on the tools about half the time, spending the rest of it project-managing with the help of business partner Rachel who deals with clients, quoting and the day-to-day running of the business. There would be about four qualified contracted staff working at any one time on three or four of the company’s projects. “We’ll build whatever you like, from a matchbox to a mansion – in fact anything the client brings us.” Kershaw Builders is a contract operator engaging sub-contractors for each of the trades required by the build, and while it’s based in the city it has ranged far and wide over the Christchurch region, from North Canterbury to Selwyn, south of the city, and also on down to Central Otago. Kershaw Builders has a particular stake in the one-time construction camp of Twizel, now a thriving tourist and retirement town, where Al owns a house and the company built seven others so far. Al has a liking for Twizel, and it seems to have the same for him, to judge from the repeat business he gets from there. The mix of houses Kershaw Builders has built in Twizel reflect where the demand is coming from: five of them were holiday homes, and the other two for permanent residents. Al got into the building business fresh out of school, doing a year-long course at Christchurch Polytechnic before going on to complete a carpentry apprenticeship with local building company Banks Built, owned by Simon Banks. After four years he went out on his own, mainly contracting out to other builders, until establishing Kershaw Builders in 2011. The company’s got plenty of work on both down in Twizel and up around Christchurch but Al’s keeping a weather eye on the market which he says is as quiet as he’s seen it in 13 years. “There’s still stuff out there but it’s slowed down a lot, and there are some people hurting,” he says. He’s got no pressing ambition to increase the size of the Kershaw Builders operation, seeing it as comfortably manageable as it is, and small and flexible enough to survive whatever the market throws at it. It’s especially resilient, he says, because he continues to keep a hands-on involvement in the actual building work, albeit necessarily for only about half the time these days. “Me being there on the spot helps brings in the repeat work,” Al says. Thousands of plumbers turn to Reece because of our reputation for “having what you need, when you need it, where you need it.” It's all about delivering the best service possible. A commitment we live by every day. New Zealand's premium supplier of plumbing and bathroom products. Proudly supporting Kershaw Builders www.reece.co.nz Concrete Grinding & Polishing Floor Preparation To Polished Finish. The True Reflection Of Quality. 0274 880 719 www.concrete-grinding.co.nz Proudly supporting Kershaw Builders
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