COLAB26, the annual offsite construction conference run by national industry body OffsiteNZ, runs on Thursday 17 September 2026 at The Atrium, Wintec, in central Hamilton. The organiser's own listing confirms a single-day programme from 8.30am to 7.30pm, with registration open and an expo area for offsite manufacturers and component suppliers built into the conference room. Five COLAB26 speakers have been announced so far, spanning modular delivery advisory, geotechnical and structural engineering, and mass timber manufacturing. It is the second consecutive Hamilton edition, following COLAB25 at the same Wintec venue in October 2025.
COLAB26 — full name COLAB26 Offsite Innovation in Construction Conference — will be held on Thursday 17 September 2026 at The Atrium, Wintec, in Hamilton. The organiser's event listing gives the running time as 8.30am to 7.30pm at Wintec Hamilton City Campus, Wintec House, Tristram Street, Whitiora, and lists no second day: this is a single-day conference with an evening function attached, not a multi-day event. Registration is open on the official COLAB site, where early-bird sales have closed and standard, group, student and exhibitor categories remain on sale ahead of the date.
The listing that circulated as "COLAB26 Offsite Construction Conference 2026" is a paraphrase. The event's own branding is simply COLAB26, with the descriptor Offsite Innovation in Construction Conference used in the site footer.
COLAB is the flagship conference of OffsiteNZ, which describes itself on its own website as a non-profit membership organisation that informs, educates and advocates for innovation and excellence in offsite design and construction in New Zealand. OffsiteNZ says it was formed in 2010 and operated as PrefabNZ until 2021, when it changed its name after consultation with members, officials, policymakers and the wider construction sector — a change the organisation says reflects the spread of offsite methods beyond housing into commercial and infrastructure work. Traces of the older identity remain in the contact links on both websites, which still point at PrefabNZ addresses.
OffsiteNZ positions COLAB as a knowledge-sharing event for what it calls enablers, disruptors and innovators in the built environment, covering the residential, commercial and infrastructure offsite sectors in New Zealand and internationally, plus the economic, regulatory, skills and sustainability picture around them.
Hamilton is not a one-off. COLAB25 was held at the same Wintec city campus address on 29 October 2025, and was followed the next day by COLAB25 Site Visits hosted at saveBOARD, the Waikato-based panel manufacturer. Returning to the same room a second year running suggests the format is settled rather than experimental.
The audience is the offsite manufacturing supply chain and the people who specify and consent its output: manufacturers, component suppliers, designers, engineers, developers, and public-sector housing and infrastructure clients.
The full running order for 2026 had not been published at the time of writing — the organiser's homepage says the programme is still being developed — but five speakers are confirmed on the official COLAB26 speakers page. Janine van Leeuwen, founder and director of advisory practice Inspira, is billed on Modern Methods of Construction as part of a wider delivery system rather than a standalone build method. Karin Speight, a principal geotechnical engineer and land development sector lead at Tonkin + Taylor, is listed to cover early feasibility assessment and foundation solutions for scalable housing delivery. Marty Verry, chief executive of Red Stag Group, is set to speak on offsite's value proposition and on VoMo, the group's volumetric modular platform factory in Rotorua. Rayno Potgieter and Steffan Sonntag, both directors at Nemean, are down to address why modular projects run into trouble before anything reaches the factory floor.
There is a trade component. OffsiteNZ's sponsor and exhibitor page sets out expo stands placed inside the conference room, a public showcase area, and a poster-based member showcase, alongside sponsorship options tied to keynote slots, the networking function and catering breaks. The stands-in-room layout means the exhibition and the conference share the same floor rather than sitting in a separate hall.
The Atrium is Wintec's largest city-campus function space. Wintec's own venue listing gives the room as 17.7m by 26.6m with capacities of 350 theatre, 200 classroom, 350 banquet and 475 cocktail, and describes exposed brick, glass walls, a 180-inch LED video wall, a raised platform, a green room, staging sections, a two-section bar and bi-fold doors opening onto a tiled courtyard. Wintec publishes downloadable layouts including a 350-pax conference set-up and a banquet-tables expo set-up — the combination COLAB26 needs to run talks and stands in one room, with pre-function spaces absorbing catering breaks and the evening drinks.
Wintec describes the campus as sitting in the heart of the city, with several commercial parking buildings nearby and on-site parking available on request. That places delegates within short walking distance of the Victoria Street hotel, café and restaurant strip that forms Hamilton's main CBD accommodation cluster, so most delegate movement on the day is on foot rather than by coach.
For out-of-town delegates, Hamilton Airport is roughly 14km south of the CBD, about 20 minutes by road. The Te Huia passenger rail service between Hamilton and Auckland's The Strand is still operating: Waikato Regional Council's Te Huia website was live and selling travel at the time of writing, flagging a timetable change from 13 September 2026 — four days before the conference — and a fare change from 28 September. Hamilton-end stations are Frankton and Rotokauri, both off-CBD, so rail arrivals still need a short onward connection to Tristram Street.
The host institution's own status has shifted since the last edition. Wintec confirmed in July 2025 that it would become an independent institute of technology again from 1 January 2026, in the first group of ten polytechnics standing back up as Te Pūkenga is wound down. Its venues operation continued through that transition.
Offsite and prefabricated construction sits at the intersection of two live New Zealand policy conversations: housing supply and construction productivity. The methods COLAB covers — panelised systems, volumetric modules, design for manufacture and assembly, standardised design — are the ones repeatedly put forward as a route to faster, more predictable delivery, and the sector's constraints are as much regulatory and financial as technical. That is reflected in the speaker line-up, which leans towards feasibility, consenting, procurement and delivery certainty rather than product showcases.
For the business events sector, COLAB26 is a familiar and useful shape: a national association conference of a few hundred people, held in a regional main centre, using a tertiary-institution venue rather than a purpose-built convention centre, and anchoring a full day of trading and networking in the host city. Hamilton's position between Auckland and the central North Island — and the presence of Waikato offsite manufacturers on the doorstep — is a straightforward part of the logic.
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