"I had done 10 years in law and it was either continue on the legal career, or do something different." Photo / Dean Purcell
"I had done 10 years in law and it was either continue on the legal career, or do something different." Photo / Dean Purcell
Property power player is a rare female in the development game.
As one of the more powerful women in property, Angela Bull acknowledges how few of her gender run big projects.
The qualified lawyer heads a $150 million-a-year programme to refurbish and expand 40 supermarkets, giving her extensive influence in the sector.
For her, the paucity of women developers is nothing new. "I'm quite accustomed to that," she says. "It doesn't faze me any more but I remember how it was a few years ago, when men used to apologise if they swore. They were more conscious of me than I was of them. But now I think the world has moved on and it's just people around the table." Bull grew up in Blockhouse Bay - "it was very west when I was a kid" - her father Alan an electrician and her mother Lynda a secretary.
"My parents were very aspirational and they worked incredibly hard. We didn't come from a family that had access to schools like St Cuthbert's College which gave you the knowledge that women can do anything," she says.
Bull counts herself lucky that her parents did make the effort to send her to St Cuth's, before she went on to study law at Auckland University.
She then worked in property and environmental law at law firms Simpson Grierson and Chapman Tripp, "as well as a stint at the Crown Law Office, working for the Attorney-General". While she was at the law firms, clients included Greg Olliver's Landco, at the time he was planning developments at Stonefields and Long Bay. The Warehouse was another client, so large property developments were her bread and butter.
She also knew Murray Jordan - until recently Foodstuffs' North Island chief executive - so her 2006 jump from resource management law into supermarket development was not such a big leap.
"I had done 10 years in law and it was either continue on the legal career, or do something different," says Bull. "Law was a tool to deliver for me and that's why I enjoyed the projects I did in that career because I could see something tangible and see how plans translated into something physical.
"I went to Foodstuffs as a property development executive, responsible for buying sites. One of the first was Wairau Park," she recalls, referring to the development of the Pak'n Save there, which involved one of New Zealand's most bitter planning disputes.
The 4899sq m, $40 million building at the centre of the battle is on Wairau Rd land bought by Foodstuffs in the 1980s, then developed. After objections by rival supermarket chain Progressive Enterprises, the Pak'nSave was built in 2005, but by 2008 it was still standing empty, locked up in legal wrangles.
Foodstuffs property chief, Angela Bull. Photo / Dean Purcell
Foodstuffs was barred from opening due to the planning dispute with Progressive, which took Pak'nSave owner the National Trading Co - a Foodstuffs (Auckland) subsidiary - to court, along with the North Shore City Council, to block the project on planning grounds. Progressive won, so the store stayed shut for years. Bull said she took a whole new approach when she stepped into that battle.
"When I came to Foodstuffs, it was an empty building, all wrapped up in the courts and very ugly and we went for a new resource consent, publicly notified. We knew it had community support because people would phone in and ask about it. It opened two years later. That was one of the biggest highlights of my career because it was looking at the problem as a puzzle and solving it."
In 2008 Bull was appointed to her current position, working with a team of 30 at Foodstuffs' Mt Roskill headquarters.
Asked to name major trends, she ticks off online shopping, more complete meal solutions, the rise of organic produce, and catering for more specialised food needs, such as gluten-free. More choice of items and more wellness-related products are other trends, she says.
A new 6000sq m Pak'nSave will open on November 10 at Todd Property's new Ormiston town centre, southeast Auckland, where Foodstuffs is leasing the store. New World Whangaparaoa opens in December and during the first quarter of next year, a replacement New World Milford will open.
Bull and husband Stephen Kirkham have children aged 1 and 4, and she says any time outside work is devoted to them.
Asked to name her most influential mentor, she names her mother: "She went back to work so I could go to StCuth's and we moved from the west to Epsom south so my brother could go to Auckland Grammar."
Bull vowed to read her children a nightly bed-time story and she says although work days can be long and hard, she sticks to that commitment.
