City luckiest for Bonus Bonds wins

Martin Brooker says telling Bonus Bond winners of their prize is one of the best aspects of his job.

Whangarei has been classed New Zealand's luckiest Bonus Bonds city with more than $2.3 million in prizes being won in the city last year.

Bonus Bonds statistics how that Whangarei, which has only 1.8 per cent of the national population, secured more dollars in prizes than any other New Zealand city last year, with more than $2.3 million won.

The statistics reviewed prize data from January to December 2013 and showed that within those 12 months, Whangarei scooped five of the large monthly prizes, a figure that has Bonus Bonds staff stumped.

Martin Brooker, manager of the Whangarei ANZ Branch, is responsible for calling up the winners to inform them of their prizes.

"It is without a doubt one of the best parts of my job. I know that other branch managers get to call winners every so often as well, but for us to be able to contact five people in 2013 to let them know they had won one of the three large monthly prizes is incredible," he said.

"At one stage, we had two-million-dollar winners, one month after the other."

The luckiest metropolitan centre per capita was Dunedin, sitting just behind Whangarei with more than $2 million in prizes, followed by Tauranga and Christchurch. Auckland managed to secure only $2 million in prizes, despite accounting for almost a third of the country's population.

"It is hard to say exactly what Whangarei is doing right to have won so many large monthly prizes, but we know that we have a large number of investors in Whangarei with bond holdings of all different sizes," Glenn Stevenson, head of Bonus Bonds at ANZ said.

Every month, Bonus Bonds pays out one prize of $1 million, one of $100,000, one of $50,000 and multiple prizes of $5000, $500, $100, $50 and $20.