Australia’s biggest home builders are cashing in on the  boom in residential construction, with the top 100 builders breaking ground on more homes than ever before over the last financial year and reaping almost $18 billion in revenue.

Unveiling its latest report on Australia’s most active home builders by number of starts, Housing Industry Association says the largest 100 home builders broke ground on 69,161 homes in 2015/16 – smashing the previous year’s record of 68,621 and coming in at almost double the level experienced three years ago.construction

Revenue for the Top 100 also increased by 6.7 percent to come in at a whopping $17.777 billion.

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Victorian based Metricon Homes took out the top spot followed by BGC (Australia) (WA), Meriton (NSW), ABN Group (WA) and Brookfield Multiplex (NSW).

Meriton surged up the ladder from fifth place to first as the Victorian builder increased its number of starts by almost 1,000 from 3,371 to 4,365.

MJH Group was the biggest mover, increasing its start numbers by 89 percent to go from 14th position to 8th.

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Whilst large builders have obviously reaped considerable levels of reward from the boom in residential construction, the nation’s 100 largest builders actually ceded a small amount of market share over the past year, taking only a 30 percent share of the overall residential building market in 2015/16 as opposed to 32 percent last year.

This indicates that smaller builders are also benefiting from the boom in new home construction along with their larger competitors.

Perhaps surprisingly, also, the nation’s biggest home builders are not as exposed to the apartment boom as might commonly be perceived to be the case.

In fact, detached housing makes up almost three quarters of the top 100 building activity.

The latest results come amid a surge in new home building throughout Australia.

All up, HIA expects the overall number of dwelling unit commencements which took place throughout Australia to come in at a record number of 232,350 when the final results are released next month.

Whilst starts are expected to slow going forward, HIA says that the strong volumes of work in the pipeline indicate that activity will ‘not fall off a cliff’ and that housing starts will register another strong year of 209,050 next year.