Symphony leaders look for new opportunities

By Bob Dey

Since leasing 7000 sq m to Deloittes two years ago, Symphony Group has gone on to lease more than 24,000 sq m of office and retail space in Auckland.

One-third of it has been at the Domain Centre, on an old industrial property in Carlton Gore Rd, Newmarket - "not a bad effort for a greenfields site," says Symphony director Chris Minty.

"Our target is to get that again in the next year."

Symphony, headed by former Chase executive chairman Colin Reynolds and Minty, led the early 90s conversion of downtown Auckland office space into apartments, has come up with the most enterprising terraced housing development yet completed, revitalised and promoted a "western precinct" around the old Farmers Trading Co department store and has two former city markets properties on the Viaduct Basin to work on.

Reynolds has stepped out of his day-to-day role at Symphony to take on strategic planning and quantum-leap work, as his old Chase partner Peter Francis has just done at Force Corporation.

Both men are looking for opportunities which will undoubtedly have a property basis, though the project or acquisition might take them on to different business fields.

Minty, meanwhile, is starting to look for new opportunities in property, possibly in different segments from his traditional commercial scope.

"I think we'll look for another residential, fairly chunky, could be a subdivision, land and building package. We haven't done any industrial for two years but we're now back looking."

One neighbourhood he expects to avoid is the one he got to know best in the 80s, CBD office towers. Although tenants of about 130,000 sq m of office space are considering their options, getting one big deal would not lead Symphony to develop a 30,000 sq m tower because, says Minty, "everyone has trouble with leasing the rest and we're not prepared to take that risk.

"We're prepared to take the risk on smaller buildings - most of our stuff is about five levels, Deloittes is eight.

"I don't imagine another tower can be promoted for a very long time. You have some space still to let in the Royal SunAlliance Centre and if PricewaterhouseCoopers go to another product, their space in two towers comes back into the equation."

It has found tenants for all but 1300 sq m in two ground-floor spaces in the first two buildings in the Domain Centre on Carlton Gore Rd, Newmarket, and this week launched its third building there for leasing.

One Domain Centre site, at the end of the line on Kingdon St, has been sold to industrial designer Hossain Reyhani for development of parking, office and retail space (see separate story).

Symphony has also leased three floors totalling 6197 sq m to IBM next to the Heritage Auckland all-suites hotel, in what is now the IBM Centre, has the Heritage Grand suites hotel due for completion in a fortnight and has a refurbishment project (the Old Markets) and a post-America's Cup redevelopment site (the superseded New Markets) in the Viaduct Basin to work on.