Floodplain data on Auckland LIM reports is 10 years out of date and the council admits it’s unable to update the flooding risk profile for house buyers and sellers until later this year.
The issue has come to light in the case of a young West Auckland family who say they can’t sell their Kumeū home because the LIM accompanying the online listing shows the property is on a floodplain, even though the council knows otherwise.
Ben Gumbrell said his family’s home at Lambarda Drive had been on the market for nearly six months, with barely anyone coming to open homes and the price dropping.
Gumbrell had hoped to get between $700,000 and $720,000 for the house – which has a capital value of $800,000 – but he had dropped the price to $698,000 and was now open to offers.
He said earthworks carried out in 2017 to fill the flood-prone area for a new development, consented and approved by the Auckland Council, removed the risk, and the property was unaffected during the 2023 floods. Despite this, the council had refused to update the LIM to reflect the changes, he said.
In a statement to the Herald, the council acknowledged Gumbrell’s frustration, saying it had made every effort to answer his questions. It also noted that its official response was technical in nature and that he remained dissatisfied with the outcome.
“I’m a victim of red tape,” said Gumbrell, who has lived at the two-bedroom townhouse since 2020 with his wife and 4-year-old son, and found the past few months stressful and disheartening.
“It’s unfair, not just for sellers but also for buyers. You don’t know what you are purchasing. The information is so incredibly outdated.”
He said the council should have a process to allow people to update their LIM report.
“All I want is to represent my house in a way that is fair, rather than using outdated information,” he said.
Ben’s father, Mark Gumbrell, is livid over the matter, saying the council’s official response to help inform potential buyers was nothing more than “gobbledygook” and a “meaningless word salad”.
In an email to the council, Mark Gumbrell said the response failed to provide information that made the revised topography clear, limited its usefulness, and did nothing to correct the erroneous data affecting the sale of the property.
Ben Gumbrell said the council’s stance was affecting not only his family but many other households, particularly in his rapidly growing area of young families and first-home buyers. He felt the council’s official response was designed more to protect its own interests than to help residents like him.
Andrew Chin, a senior officer with the council’s stormwater division, Healthy Waters, said the flood information on the LIM for the Dumbrell’s property comes from the most recent flood‑mapping, published in 2023, which relies on LiDAR data collected in 2016.
Because the data was old, he said, the council provided written acknowledgements to property owners, noting that the maps may not reflect later earthworks or flood‑mitigation changes.
Chin said Auckland‑wide LiDAR was re‑flown in 2024, and the council was now rebuilding all flood‑plain models, catchment by catchment. Updated maps for the Kumeū-Huapai area are expected in late 2026.
The council stated that a multi-year update cycle had been standard since 2012, although public interest in flood risk had increased since the 2023 storms. It also noted that individual resource‑consent earthworks could not be used for catchment‑wide flood modelling, as developments occur in stages and plans often changed.
Chin emphasised that a LIM was only a starting point for due diligence, and encouraged buyers to review property files and seek specialist advice.
He said a LIM provided a high‑level snapshot of the information the council holds about a property at a specific point in time.
He said the law does not require councils to update natural‑hazard information immediately after development occurs, and that given the scale of construction across Auckland, it would be impractical to continually remodel catchments when earthworks were completed.
Craig McIlroy, who heads Healthy Waters, said the LiDAR exercise was major, which takes two years to update the models and rainfall data. All up, the cost is about $8 million.
He said since the 2023 floods, the modelling figures had been blown out of the park, and Healthy Water was looking at running the exercise every four years. It is currently rerun every eight years.
“We are doing the best we can to give the community as much updated information as we can,” he said.
McIlroy said the council cannot change a LIM between the LiDAR exercises because it had no technical veracity to base new information on.
“I have huge sympathy for his [Ben Gumbrell] situation ... I’m not sure what more we could be doing.”
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