Kingsland Apartments in Auckland where owners were presented with options for repairs.
Questions after $36.6 million quote to fix Kingsland Apartments, Anna Mowbray/Ali Williams helicopter application update, Wyborn Capital’s moves, Supreme Court on how Māori traditionally regarded land - all this in today’s Property Insider.
How can it be that owners of 19-year-old apartments are pondering a massive fix or even rebuilding?
When revelations of a minimum $36.6 million bill to fix units were published last week, people had two questions:
The gobsmackingly awful situation for owners of the 90 units between New North Road and 11 Kingsland Terrace emerged after a series of written communications between the body corporate and owners, provided to the Herald by an upset owner. The body corporate put an option to owners in October for a demolition and rebuild, costing $82m.
Until last week, high-profile national builder CMP Construction NZ had Kingsland Apartments on its website as one of its projects, putting the completion date for the $19m building as 2005.
The managing contractor for the building was Construct Management Pacific, an entity which has not traded since 2009 but was still directed by CMP’s Ron Macrae.
CMP said the apartments were built in four blocks “in a prime location overlooking Eden Park. The development includes underground parking, a swimming pool, gym and retail shops on New North Rd.”
Macrae’s Victoria Park-headquartered business has big experience in apartments, having built thousands.
Clients included Kāinga Ora. Luxury jobs like Remuera’s now completed $150m Victoria Lane for Richard Kroon were also carried out by CMP. That five-level building has 22 apartments, with 52 basement car parks running the full-length underground.
The Herald visited the project in February 2023 when CMP was building it. The interview with Kroon at the time is below.
Anna Mowbray and Ali Williams’ helipad application for their $24m Westmere property is progressing after submissions closed late last year.
An Auckland Council spokeswoman said 1397 submissions were received: 1277 were opposed, 108 supported it, and 12 were neutral. Submissions closed on November 26.
But we can’t yet find out what people said.
Submissions would not be released while the application is live and the spokeswoman cited advice from the resource consents team.
“In order to ensure a fair hearing for the applicant and submitters, we are not able to release the submissions while they are still being assessed by planners. They will be made available and published on the council’s website 15 working days before a hearing is held,” she said.
When that will be hasn’t been announced.
No one person or kinship group owned land, according to what the Supreme Court has indicated is the best knowledge.
That issue was raised in a Supreme Court decision issued on December 2 saying the majority of the Court of Appeal “erred” in a major decision that ultimately eased the test for Māori to gain customary rights for use of the foreshore and seabed.
The December 2 decision addressed the issue of Māori customary rights to land, saying: “It is difficult to improve upon the following summary by Associate Professor Andrew Erueti as to the nature of tikanga-based land rights held by whānau and hapū prior to the Treaty”.
According to Māori land custom, no one individual or kinship group owned land in the sense that they held virtually all rights in land to the exclusion of other levels of kinship or adjacent groups. Rather, different levels of the hapū social order exercised different kinds of rights in the same area of land.
“The right to traverse a stretch of land could extend to the hapū as a whole, but the right to cultivate particular garden plots within the same area could be exercised by smaller entities: individuals, chiefs, ope [outside groups] of kin, nuclear families, and whānau,” the decision said.
These rights were transferred by a number of customary means. Major transfers could occur through war or threat of war.
However, the rights to specific resources, such as the right to fishing stands, trees attractive to birds, or small garden plots, were commonly transferred from, by, and to individuals, through gifting and inheritance.
Specific rights were transferred in this way to other hapū members and also to members of adjacent groups without necessarily conferring with the hapū as a whole or its ruling chief or chiefs.
As a result, “the rights of individuals of different hapū came to intersect on the ground”, resulting in a patchwork of use-rights.
These rights were ordered and prioritised according to well‑recognised principles but with a marked emphasis on context so that the solution chosen best suited the demands of the moment, the decision said.
It was common for an area of land occupied by hapū to be subject to a number of competing claims of right made by groups that had occupied the land in the past.
These could be recently defeated peoples forced off the land by the present occupants, or groups that had migrated to new lands. They may no longer occupy the land but in their eyes they retained mana or authority over it.
These competing claims and the intricate system of intersecting rights held by the members of different kinship groups made it difficult to say who owned the land, or waters of lakes, lagoons, rivers, and the open seas, it said.
A major hapū occupying a particular territory undisturbed by war and migration for several generations could hold something akin to ownership in the common law sense described above, inviting in migrating hapū and permitting defeated hapū to remain on the land. However, it was much more common for several different groups to hold interests in the same area of land.
Also, time altered all relationships and degrees of right. Māori descent groups in the 18th century were in a constant state of mutation, waxing, and waning according to the vicissitudes of customary life, the decision said.
If a group asserting authority over a locality waned over time through political misfortune, a new group could replace it.
It therefore makes more sense to speak of different groups and individuals owning rights in the land, rather than owning the land itself, the court decision said.
Justin Wyborn of the wealthy private family investment business Wynborn Capital said there had been a brief pause in acquisitions due to the slow and unstable environment in the past two years in Auckland.
But now the business which has huge Viaduct Harbour interests was “back in action”.
The company’s focus was on uncovering value-add opportunities in the $10m to $50m range.
In the past eight weeks, it had bought two properties and transformations were already in progress, Wyborn said.
Its first project for this year is redeveloping 27 Edinburgh Street on 730sq m of land into modern offices for city fringe occupiers.
Its second is at 17 Parity Place, Wairau Valley which Colliers advertised as being on the market for the first time in more than 30 years. The 963sq m office and warehouse building is on a slightly elevated 1776sq m site zoned business-light industry. It was a joinery shop but was sold with vacant possession.
Wyborn also cited his family company’s investment in sustainable aluminium canning start-up Recorp.
That business had a “state-of-the-art facility in Wiri” which was a game changer, able to produce more than 500 million cans annually, ending New Zealand’s reliance on offshore can suppliers, Wyborn said.
March 18 is the close-off date for submissions on engineered stone, according to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
This is a popular kitchen and bathroom bench material used in New Zealand homes and businesses.
In its solid form, it does not have hazardous properties.
It is the dust that is generated from cutting, grinding, or polishing engineered stone that has the potential to cause harm when it is breathed in usually over long periods of exposure, the ministry said.
A coalition of unions and public health and safety experts wants the Government to follow Australia’s lead and ban engineered stone due to its links to the lung disease silicosis, warning “a fashionable kitchen should not come at the cost of lives”.
Anne Gibson has been the Herald’s property editor for 24 years, written books and covered property extensively here and overseas.
“We just knew it would be impossible to find anything else like that in Auckland."