OffsiteNZ has confirmed its annual COLAB conference returns to Hamilton on Thursday 17 September 2026, running 8.30am to 9.00pm at The Atrium, Wintec, with registrations open and the first speakers announced. It is the second consecutive edition at the Wintec Hamilton City Campus after COLAB25 was held there in October 2025.
New Zealand's offsite construction sector has its 2026 meeting point locked in. OffsiteNZ has confirmed that COLAB26 — the Offsite Innovation in Construction Conference — will be held on Thursday 17 September 2026 at The Atrium, Wintec, in Hamilton, with the official event page listing a running time of 8.30am to 9.00pm and registrations already open.
The conference website gives the venue address as Wintec Hamilton City Campus, Wintec House, Tristram Street, Whitiora, Hamilton 3204, and the organiser's own homepage carries the venue in its headline: "COLAB26 17 September 2026, The Atrium, Wintec, Hamilton". That resolves an ambiguity in aggregator listings, some of which carried the Hamilton date without naming a confirmed room.
COLAB is convened by OffsiteNZ, which describes itself on its own About Us page as "a non-profit membership organisation that informs, educates and advocates for innovation and excellence in offsite design and construction in New Zealand". The organisation states it was formed in 2010 and was previously known as PrefabNZ, changing its name in 2021 after what it calls "much consideration and broad discussion over a number of years with stakeholders including members, non-members, officials, policymakers, the public and the wider construction sector". OffsiteNZ says the rename reflected an industry that had broadened beyond housing prefabrication into "secondary dwellings, residential, commercial and infrastructure sectors".
That lineage matters for the event's standing. COLAB is not a new commercial trade show bolted onto a growth sector; it is the annual set-piece of a sixteen-year-old industry body, and OffsiteNZ describes it on its own pages as "a well-established conference event". The organisation's stated mission is to be "a member-focused innovation champion", and COLAB is where that membership convenes in person. Listed OffsiteNZ partners include GIB, Dialog Property, Mitre 10, Weathertex and Argon & Co.
The series has moved around the motu in recent years — a COLAB conference ran in Auckland in 2024 — but Hamilton is now its established home. COLAB25 was held at the same Wintec Hamilton City Campus venue on 29 October 2025, running 8.00am to 9.00pm, with registration since closed. COLAB26 therefore represents a second consecutive Waikato edition, and a move forward in the calendar by roughly six weeks.
OffsiteNZ pitches COLAB in characteristically direct terms: "mass knowledge sharing on a massive scale at its finest. For enablers, disruptors and innovators in the built environment." The audience is the design-and-delivery end of construction — manufacturers, structural and geotechnical engineers, developers, architects, main contractors, housing providers, regulators and policy officials — rather than a general public trade audience.
The organiser's framing for 2026 is that "offsite manufacturing in the construction sector is entering the next stage in its exciting development", with awareness of the benefits grown and "a wide range of innovative businesses in the market". The programme, per the official site, will feature updates from industry partners alongside a showcase of trends and innovations "within the residential, commercial and infrastructure offsite sector in New Zealand and internationally", plus keynote speakers and "an overview of the economic, regulatory, skills and sustainability landscape shaping the sector". OffsiteNZ's own COLAB page adds that the format includes a dedicated expo area and an offsite showcase section profiling solutions currently in the market.
The detailed 2026 running order is still in development — the site states plainly that "our programme is being developed" — but the first speakers are published. Steffan Sonntag, Director and Senior Structural Engineer at Nemean Consulting, will address why many modular projects struggle long before manufacturing begins. His colleague Rayno Potgieter, a Director at Nemean who the site says has been involved in more than 100 offsite and modular building projects, is billed on early-stage uncertainty and pre-construction waste. Karin Speight, Principal Geotechnical Engineer and Sector Lead for Land Development at Tonkin + Taylor, will speak on how early feasibility assessments and smarter foundation solutions can improve resilience and support scalable housing delivery. The 2025 edition ran a keynote, industry updates, New Zealand case study presentations, a global case studies session and a conference dinner from 6.30pm — a shape the 8.30am-to-9.00pm 2026 timing suggests will be broadly repeated.
The Atrium is Wintec's largest city-campus function space. Wintec's own venue page describes it as having "stylish original exposed brick, stunning glass walls and vibrant contemporary furniture", and positions it for "awards dinners, exhibitions, corporate functions, large conferences and wedding receptions". The published room dimensions are 17.7m by 26.6m, with capacity given as 350 theatre, 200 classroom, 350 banquet and 475 cocktail. Features listed include a 180-inch LED screen video wall, staging components, a green room, bi-fold doors opening onto a tiled courtyard, multiple entry points, an on-site AV technician and free Wi-Fi. Wintec also notes several pre-function spaces and adjacency to its other city venues, allowing multi-venue configurations.
That combination — a plenary floor plus expo-capable pre-function space and a banquet setting for the evening — is what makes a single-room, single-day, breakfast-to-dinner conference workable in one building. Delegates do not need to relocate between the sessions, the exhibition and the dinner.
The campus sits on Tristram Street in Whitiora, at the northern end of the Hamilton CBD, which puts the city's central accommodation and hospitality cluster along and around Victoria Street within short walking distance. Wintec notes a number of commercial parking buildings close by, with on-site parking available on request — relevant for a delegate base that is substantially Waikato- and Auckland-based and likely to self-drive.
For those flying, Hamilton Airport lies roughly 14km south of the CBD, around 20 minutes by road in normal conditions, with Air New Zealand operating domestic services including Wellington and Christchurch, and Jetstar also serving Christchurch. Hamilton is also within comfortable driving range of Auckland and Tauranga, which broadens the same-day catchment considerably.
COLAB26 is a useful data point for the Waikato's business events case. Hamilton has spent years arguing that it can hold national-scale association conferences without deferring to Auckland or Wellington, and a repeat booking is the strongest evidence a destination can offer: the 2025 edition worked well enough that the organiser came back. It also demonstrates the role tertiary campus venues play in the New Zealand conference market, where an institute of technology's function space can carry a national industry conference, its exhibition and its gala dinner under one roof.
The sector context adds weight. Offsite and modular construction sits at the intersection of New Zealand's housing supply pressures, building-consent reform and construction productivity — a policy area with sustained government and industry attention. A conference that convenes the manufacturers, engineers and developers working in that space, in a region with significant manufacturing capacity of its own, is a meaningful piece of the national events calendar rather than a diary filler.
Cited links supporting this report.
The 20th New Zealand Management Accounting Conference 2026 is a three-day association conference (23-25 Nov) hosted by Waikato Management School on the University of Waikato Hamilton campus, themed 'Transforming Management Accounting' and combined with the World Conference on Management Accounting Research, with plenary speakers from CA ANZ, CPA Australia and the XRB.
A two-day national forum (10-11 Nov 2026, Claudelands, Hamilton) where New Zealand's critical infrastructure sector, hosted by the NZ Lifelines Council, works on shared resilience.
Hamilton and Waikato venues that seat 250 or more guests for a gala dinner or banquet, ranked by banquet capacity.
NZIC Conference 2026, the biennial meeting of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry, runs 15–19 November 2026 at The Pā, University of Waikato, Hamilton. The official site confirms venue and dates; the RSC listing gives organiser, subject streams and a ~250-delegate estimate.
How to move conference delegates around Hamilton and the Waikato, with the 15 transport operators listed on MICE.
Hamilton and Waikato's unique event venues — SkyCity, Hamilton Gardens, Hobbiton, Zealong and marae — for conferences, galas and functions.