Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei Whai Rawa: Unitec apartment planning, Oneoneroa under way | T-10 NEWS

Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s investment arm is planning its first 38 homes at Carrington’s Unitec and has 42 terraces and apartments up on the North Shore.

Lawyer Grant Kemble, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei Whai Rawa’s newly-appointed chief
executive, and property general manager Neil Donnelly took the Herald on a tour of Oneoneroa, Belmont.

There, 42 places worth around $60 million are either up and being lived in or nearing completion. Sixteen new homes near the Eversleigh Rd/Lowe St corner are due to be finished around November but haven’t been pre-sold.

Kemble says that’s because the balance sheet was so strong that the entity can afford to fund development work without deposits, usually demanded by banks and lenders to get funding for construction.

The newest 16 homes range from two to five bedrooms and are expected to sell for between $1.1m and $1.7m.

Across the bridge at Mt Albert, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei is planning the first apartments at Unitec.

“We’re weeks away from applying for resource consent for the first 38 on the southern part of the site near Woodward Rd. It will be all terraced housing. We’d plan to start building next year,” Donnelly said of a 4.1-hectare site.

But Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei has a further 9ha it can build on there, so has much bigger plans. Kemble said plans were to develop up to three levels in Carrington.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development says that in the next 10 to 15 years, at least 4000 homes will be built at Unitec on 39.7ha of land.

“The project is a large-scale urban development led by the three Tāmaki Makaurau rōpū of Marutūāhu, Ngāti Whātua and Waiohua-Tāmaki and their project partners. It is being facilitated by the Crown via Te Tūāpapa Kura Kāinga the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development,” HUD says.

In 2018, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the development at Unitec’s Te Noho Kotahitanga Marae in her Mt Albert electorate, saying the mix of affordable and open-market housing would include parks, shops and a new school.

Donnelly said at Belmont’s Oneoneroa, around 300 to 350 homes were planned on 7ha in the next five to six years, although more can be built on other sites bought under treaty settlement agreements.

The Belmont land is ex-Royal New Zealand Navy land, once home to single or two-storey homes, but now more intense use is being made of the land.

All up, around 550 new homes are envisaged in the Belmont/Bayswater area.

Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei is selling the new apartments and terraces as freehold, whereas down at Ngataringa Bay, it only leased land to Ryman Healthcare, which is nearing completion of the new William Sanders retirement village.

Family-owned Vivian Construction is the primary builder for this new stage of Oneoneroa. That is managed by three brothers who grew up on the North Shore. Context Architects were appointed by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei Properties to design this current stage of work at Belmont.

Development work started on the Lake Rd end, and “basically we’re trying to build out towards the view”, Donnelly said, pointing to the waterfront and Auckland Harbour Bridge vistas.

Across the water, Donnelly said another 38 homes were papa kāinga housing on Kupe St/Hawaiki St, Ōrākei.

So by this time next year, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei could be active at three Auckland sites: Belmont, Ōrākei and Carrington.

In February, the Herald reported Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s bottom-line profits had been boosted by nearly quarter-of-a-billion-dollar asset growth.

Accounts for the year to June 30, 2021, showed a $243 million net gain from its investment property assets, up on the far more conservative $43m gain the previous year for the tangata whenua of central Tāmaki Makaurau.

Investment property assets are now valued at $1.4 billion, up from $1.1bn previously, and the iwi is conservatively geared against rising interest rates with only a 16 per cent loan-to-value ratio.

Latest accounts show net profit before tax of $254m for the June 2021 year, up on $58m previously, with total comprehensive income at $251m, up on $55m.

The iwi acknowledges how important the whenua is to its accounts. Michael Stiassny, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei Whai Rawa chairman, noted rising revaluations’ role.

“It’s no surprise that in a year which saw property price records being broken in many locations across the country, an organisation with substantial property holdings saw that reflected positively on its balance sheet,” he wrote in the annual report.