Countdown for $100m Auckland build begins

The 13ha Vinegar Lane site. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Ponsonby's hole in the ground to get makeover by Progressive Enterprises.

A nine-level $100 million development will soon rise on a yawning chasm behind Ponsonby Rd in one of the biggest projects by Progressive Enterprises, which has a billion-dollar New Zealand work pipeline.

Adrian Walker, Progressive Enterprises' general property manager, and Progressive development manager Brady Nixon, said work could begin on Vinegar Lane on the 1.3ha Soho site after Auckland Council last week granted 36 resource consents in one of the more complicated projects by the business.

Progressive created and sold 31 freehold fee simple titles for apartments and offices alongside its big new supermarket on a site that was too big for just the supermarket.

A 4200sq m Countdown, the new shops, commercial space and 680 car parks will be built on the vacant site between Pollen St, Williamson Ave and Crummer Rd, a block behind Ponsonby Rd, where about 24,000cu m of soil was returned to the heavily excavated site.

Progressive has an existing Countdown on Williamson Ave, which Walker said would stay when the new supermarket was finished because the two stores will serve different catchments.

Progressive wants to get more customers on the northern side of the ridge towards Victoria Park.

The 36 consents cover the whole 1.3ha Vinegar Lane site, including the Cider Building development with the supermarket, five levels of basement parking and three levels of offices as well as the Vinegar Lane retail development.

Individual site lots will be developed by each lot owner.

The development for the old DYC Vinegar factory site will not be finished until about 2016. Walker said the non-notified resource consents took 11 months to obtain.

"It's taken longer than it should have but it wasn't a straightforward application with 36 consents. We would have liked to have it issued in days but it was relatively complex," Walker said of the scheme, which is over regulation height.

Nixon said all 31 development sites were pre-sold for between $285,000 and $1.4 million, and 10 per cent deposits had been collected.

"There's a wide mixture of plans for those sites," Nixon said. "About six are for architects doing small developments, investors putting up apartments, three or four terrace houses, a couple of small office buildings and some property developers doing mixed-use projects."

Master planner for the project David Irwin of Isthmus said Vinegar Lane was different to Soho - the controversial $230 million apartment, office and car park scheme that was never built.

"This is the first urban subdivision in Auckland for some time, inside the central city area, creating a new 12m wide laneway ... that creates public street building frontages."

Ponsonby's Vinegar Lane

Level 1: Basement car park titles being sold to lot buyers.
Levels 2, 3: Office car parking Levels 4, 5: Countdown car parking.
Level 6: Countdown supermarket.
Levels 7, 8, 9: Offices.
[Source: Progressive Enterprises]