An Australian Indigenous training and services provider has signed a joint venture agreement with Bosnia’s leading prefabricated housing company to build up to 3,000 houses a year in Australia. That is according to a joint statement published on Thursday by Syncorana Group and Steco Centar, which establishes a new business, Steco (Australia) Pty Ltd, to supply the Australian and Oceanic markets.
The announcement names no site and no construction date, and the partners say only that they intend to establish a plant costing close to A$150 million. It would supply residential housing, Indigenous affordable and social housing, aged care, early childhood education, workforce accommodation, and commercial development. The plant would house a registered training organisation, Living Planit/Dreamtime Institute of Training and Management, which the partners want to run as a national centre of excellence for prefabricated construction.
It comes as Milenko Stevanović, the owner and chairman of Steco Centar, returns to a market he left after three decades in Australia. He and his children still hold Australian passports, and the business he started after returning to Bijeljina now exports to Europe, Africa, and South America. “Together we intend to combine European engineering expertise with Australian manufacturing capability,” Stevanović said, and he wants the training centre inside the plant to pass Steco’s engineering and manufacturing systems to Australian workers.
Steco has built prefabricated houses since 1992, from a factory covering more than 12,000 square metres.
“A market leader in design, production, sales, and assembly of prefabricated wooden houses,” the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development wrote of Steco Centar, which in 2022 provided a grant toward upgrading its finger-jointing and strength-testing equipment.
Steco builds in closed timber panels, each wall framed in wood and sheathed on both faces with OSB, Fermacell, or gypsum over a stone or glass wool core. Steco holds FSC chain-of-custody certification and says its frames use certified wood of controlled origin and carry fire ratings ranging from F30 to F90.
A Steco Centar render of one of its single-storey prefabricated houses. The company closes its timber frames on both faces with OSB, Fermacell or gypsum sheathing, and has never sold into Australia. (Image Credit: Steco Centar)
“Through this joint venture we intend to establish advanced manufacturing capability that can deliver high-quality prefabricated housing faster, more efficiently and at scale,” said Carlton Taya, the Syncorana chief executive and managing director. Taya wants the venture supplying government, institutional investors, developers, and community housing providers across Oceania.
Syncorana’s training arm would open pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, apprentices, veterans, and school leavers, teaching them to manufacture, assemble, and install prefabricated building systems.
A Steco Centar render of a two-storey prefabricated house. Fire ratings on the company’s frames run from F30 to F90, and it holds an FSC chain of custody certificate FSC-C166470. (Image Credit: Steco Centar)
Sydney is the second least affordable of the 96 markets Demographia surveyed in 2026, behind Hong Kong, and has ranked first, second, or third in 16 of the last 17 years. Australia’s imports of prefabricated and modular buildings reached a record $326.4 million in the year to November 2025, up 51.1 per cent on the previous twelve months, with wooden prefab a small corner of that trade at $23.3 million.
Both companies say the venture will strengthen Australia’s sovereign manufacturing capability, the same case a union-funded John Curtin Research Centre blueprint made in July. It found import substitution worth $4.28 billion across a modelled decade and named Australia’s timber processors and engineered wood makers as the supply-side engine of factory-built housing.
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