A brand-new, fully furnished Napier childcare centre is seemingly abandoned. Why?

At the bottom of Chaucer Rd South sits a brand new building, fully furnished yet has been sitting vacant for almost a year. Photo / Warren Buckland

It's a brand new fully furnished commercial building in a high-profile Napier site: there's just one problem - it's abandoned.

At the bottom of Chaucer Rd South sits a brand new shipping container-style modular building seemingly set up as a childcare centre.

It's worth roughly $2 million according to QV's latest stats.

But no kids, no parents, no staff have ever been in and out of the building in the year that it's been there.

Businesses around the site said the empty building had become something of a mystery for the area.

A spokesman at Williams Auto Electrical, which neighbours the empty site, said staff found it odd to have a brand new building, which took so much effort to build, be left untouched since January.

"Although we don't see much of what's going on since our building backs on to the site, it has been a bit of a puzzling thing wondering what is going to happen to the building."

The building on the corner of Chaucer Rd and Carlyle St used to be the site of the well-known Hawke's Bay watering hole The Royal Tavern before it was sold in April 2016 to an Auckland-based development company, LEP2 Limited.

The company, LEP2 Limited, is owned by Mark Finlay and Russell Thompson.

Finlay was the former Evolve Education chief executive and founded the Lollipops Educare Group.

He also played top level rugby for Manawatu and was a one-time All Black, yet never managed to play a test.

The building on the corner of Chaucer Rd and Carlyle St used to be the site of the well-known Hawke's Bay watering hole The Royal Tavern before it was sold in April 2016. Photo / File

The building appears to house a childcare centre, but confirmation on this and why it has been left unused are yet to be clarified.

Multiple attempts by Hawke's Bay Today to contact the owners have been unanswered.

The Royal Tavern, which was one of Napier's oldest pubs, moved to the corner of Chaucer Rd and Carlyle St more than 150 years ago from the Ahuriri spit, where it was often flooded.

It was a well-known spot. The at times troubled pub was put up for sale in 2010 but was passed in at auction after bidding failed to reach reserve.

It later closed in 2014 because of rising costs and poor patronage and then LEP2 Limited bought the site in 2016 for $305,000 and planned to start development early.

LEP Group development manager Rory O'Connor said shortly after the property was purchased the tavern would be demolished.

That happened and then a potential childcare centre's construction was started in April 2017.

But construction ran into problems when archaeologists surveyed the site and found skeletal remains which they thought to be pre-European Maori.

It is now believed the remains were of an animal but the halt in works delayed the building's completion by over a year.

What happened since that is anyone's guess.