Mr Staples asked anyone who wanted to pursue legal action to submit their details to him. About half the group have done so, he said.
The cases look good. They will have to be taken invidually because they are all different.
Owners have been warned they will take at least two years, and any repairs will have to start after that.
"For some people, it will be two and a half to three years before they can get back in their homes," Mr Goodier said.
He's in a bad situation, but had the impression others could be worse off.
He's been renting a house to live in for more than five months. His insurance company will pay $20,000 for accommodation and, when that runs out, he will have to pay himself.
Loaders has estimated the cost of a new retaining wall for his Shakespeare Rd property at $237,000. EQC is offering $113,000, the value of a wrecked retaining wall combined with the value of the land immediately around it.
The slip didn't touch his house but engineers have found it dropped 25mm. It has been red stickered by Whanganui District Council and he can't live in it. Yet EQC says it is undamaged.
"If nothing changes we would never be able to afford to go back to our house, because we would never be able to make the repairs needed," Mr Goodier said.
Whanganui's low land prices are a big factor in the low EQC payouts. "If I was living on a half million dollar section in Auckland they wouldn't want to pay for the land, they would want to pay for the repair."
There's nothing that can be done about the low land values, Mr Staples said, but he can see opportunities to maximise entitlements for affected Whanganui people.
His team will be back in Whanganui early next year, to start assessing properties.
His usual fee is 20 per cent of what clients get from EQC, over and above the commission's initial offer. But he said he was offering Whanganui people a special, lower, deal.
