Christchurch-headquartered Brooksfield Homes has pre-sold most of its eight planned colonial-style weatherboard townhouses in two Auckland projects in its debut in the city.
Brooksfield managing director Vinny Holloway said the company planned eight new Pt Chevalier homes on two sites, with a projected end valuation of $11.6 million.
It calls these places “cottages” because of their architectural design, and aims to revive styles of homes prevalent in many older suburbs.
Deposits had been paid on five of eight Brooksfield cottages before construction began, he said.
“We’ve been marketing 51 Moa Rd with a completed valuation of just over $6m, and 61 Smale St with a completed value of $5.6m,” he said.
“We’re coming to Auckland because we have a lot of requests from Aucklanders, people who love our houses and don’t want to move to Christchurch.”
The townhouses are priced from $1.2m for a 98sq m two-bedroom, 1.5 bathroom, one study and a garage.
For $1.58m, a three-bedroom 2.5-bathroom home is for sale.
The homes are planned to have pitched roofs, tall gables, finials and verandas, “more Auckland than a lot of the stuff we do in Christchurch”.
New developments in Auckland were “awful” and many Aucklanders want a villa or bungalow close to the city, Holloway said.
Yet many people could not afford those but they could afford a Brooksfield home, he said.
Central suburbs had “quite a lot of bad development”.
Part of the reason why older homes last so long is because they were beautiful and people loved them, he said.
He had not found Auckland lacklustre.
“We’ve pre-sold three out of four in Smale St and two out of four in Moa Rd.”
Asked why he thought the company had such strong early success in Auckland, Holloway said it was the product as well as great timing.
“We’re buying the land at today’s price, whereas many other developers have bought sites at a much higher price,” Holloway said.
However, he believes a market for beautiful homes will always exist, despite the economy.
“The reason developers in Auckland are having a hard time selling is that their homes are absolutely awful.
“The only time they will sell those is when the market is excessively hot.”
Asked if Brooksfield was faking the past with older-looking homes, he said classical architecture was a language and was not fake.
“It’s like classical music. Is it fake to play classical music today? Because we’re reviving classical architecture, it doesn’t mean it’s fake,” he said.
The sites the company had bought were each about 700sqm.
Each house would be on a 150sq m to 200sq m site.
Each of the sites had only one home on it previously so Brooksfield was backing density.
The company needed to come to Auckland, which was suffering a massive loss with so many older homes being demolished, Holloway said.
Yet there was a need for density, with the way people live these days.
More people were happy to live on smaller sites, “but the homes don’t have to be ugly. That’s the main point of what we do”.
Brooksfield was making offers on other fringe city sites and planned to expand into Westmere, Mt Albert and Mt Eden.
“We want to stick to an area and get our knowledge up so we’ll probably eventually go to the [North] Shore.”
Holloway said he had once lived in Devonport and he loved that area’s heritage homes. Most suburbs in Auckland were not like that, however, he said.
Last year, Holloway told the Herald he got up to 10 inquiries a week from people in Auckland and Wellington asking them to start developing in the cities, as the demand for medium-density housing like townhouses and apartments rises.
But he says many people have grown an aversion to higher-density housing because lots of new townhouses are “really harsh to look at”.
“It’s not only that they’re ugly, it’s also that they’re poorly built and they’re not very high quality.”
Last month, Holloway and co-founder Oliver Hickman featured in Society Insider by Ricardo Simich.
Brooksfield has delivered more than 600 houses since its inception in 2019, making the pair millions of dollars.
But rather than creating cookie-cutter terraces, the pair are focused on “storybook” homes – Georgian colonial-revival weatherboard and brick townhouses that blend into the heritage homes around them, Simich reported.
The duo, who are in their 30s, are further building their empire, moving into creating communities with multiple houses and streets, commercial property and have started a tax application to take on Xero, he wrote.
They had a passion for breaking the tropes usually associated with being a developer, they said.
Anne Gibson has been the Herald‘s property editor for 25 years, written books and covered property extensively here and overseas.