Portstone Garden Centre has operated at the at 465 Ferry Rd site since 1980. Photo / Supplied
The land and buildings housing one of Christchurch's first independently-owned garden centres and an associated cafe has been placed on the market for sale.
Portstone Garden Centre at 465 Ferry Rd, Woolston, has been operating at the site since 1980. Spread over an indoor/outdoor layout, Portstone's catalogue of stock includes flowers, shrubs and trees, landscaping supplies and garden ornaments, water features, fertiliser and sprays, tools, outdoor furniture, and glasshouses.
The retailing business also operates a 38-seater cafe overlooking the outdoor plant display areas.
The 1160sq m warehouse-style building on 4803sq m of freehold land have been placed on the market for sale by a deadline process through Bayleys Canterbury, with offers closing at 4pm on June 28. The property features in Bayleys' latest Total Propertyportfolio magazine.
Bayleys Canterbury salesperson Stewart White says the property is for sale with "vacant possession", with both the garden centre and cafe moving out in the near future. The property sits on the axis of Ferry Rd and Smith St and is zoned Business 1 under Christchurch Council's planning designations.
"The future of this site really is hard to pick because there are so many flexible pieces with the wider picture — from the current business use or its prominent corner site location, through to changing social dynamics and the impact those are having on society," White says.
"Most obviously, the sale of this property presents an opportunity for a retail gardening supplies operator in the market to either relocate operations into a well-known purpose-built destination, or for a new entrant into this sector of retailing to establish a garden supplies retailing business entity on the site."
The Ferry Rd buildings are predominantly timber framed based on concrete floors and foundations, with exposed pitched beams and rafters and corrugated iron roofing. The property is surrounded with security fencing, while an expansive tarsealed car park has parking for 47 vehicles.
"The structural configuration and open-plan lay-out of the building complex means it could also be a turn-key site for a hardware and home building supply outlet — with the potential to quite easily add new warehousing space."
White the site could be redeveloped into a suburban shopping hub — with Ferry Road being the main arterial route linking Christchurch CBD with the city's south-eastern suburbs of Sumner, Mount Pleasant, Ferrymead, Lyttelton and Woolston.
Land Transport Authority traffic-usage figures show about 23,500 vehicles are driven past the property on an average week day with most being suburban commuters.
"With a growing number of families becoming reliant on the incomes from two working parents to sustain their mortgage, there is often correspondingly less time for such fundamental household chores such as shopping for dinner," White says.
"Consequently, suburban convenience-focused shopping hubs have sprouted up throughout New Zealand over the past decade. This enables urban dwellers to pull in to their local complex, get a ready-made meal or ingredients for that night's dinner, along with a bottle of wine or a few beers — all in one visit.
"It has also been mooted that the location could be transformed into an industrial-themed hospitality hub capable of sustaining between three and five individual outlets operating under one roof."
Examples of this hub-style configuration include the highly-successful Ponsonby Central hospitality destination in Auckland's Ponsonby Rd, or the recently opened Press Hall in Wellington's Willis St, containing 12 independent eateries.
White says that the Ferry Rd site could be leased to multiple stand-alone food and beverage operators, or sustain one sole-operator creating several distinctly themed non-competing spaces under a one-roof destination. Within the complex of building structures is a two-storeyed administration block containing offices, as well as staff bathrooms and kitchen area.
The garden centre retailing portion of the complex has a structural rating of 70 per cent of New Build Standards (NBS) while the cafe portion of the property has a structural rating of 90 per cent of NBS.