Million-dollar Christchurch apartment plans scrapped
Monday, 21 January 2019
Plans for two new Christchurch apartment towers promising million-dollar homes have been dropped, with a slow market getting the blame.
The owners of the sites of The Verve Apartments planned for Peterborough St by Victoria St, and the Carlton Mill Apartments planned opposite Hagley Park, are both offered their land for sale.
The Carlton Mill Apartments were announced as a rebuild of the Millbrook apartments on Carlton Mill Rd, which were demolished after the earthquakes.
When they first hit the market in 2016, the 14 apartments were priced at $1.6m and up. Developer Richard Batt, of Sovereign Development and Construction, promised then the homes would be the biggest and most luxurious apartments built in the city since the earthquakes.
**READ MORE:
* Costs, lack of apartment culture holding back Christchurch's inner city push
* Open school zone proposal aimed at boosting central Christchurch numbers
* Unhappy neighbours trigger urgent council look at housing rules
* $50 million tower to replace lost apartments in central Christchurch
* More million-dollar apartments for central Christchurch**
Batt could not be contacted for comment, but advertising for the vacant site is headed 'Owner needs to liquidate'.
The planned seven-storey building would have held 14 homes, each with a 240sqm floor area.
In the Victoria St area, the $50m Verve Apartment building was designed as a replacement for another demolished apartment tower, the Est@blishment.
Consented in 2016, the project was intended to be built with 62 apartments priced from $400,000 to over $1m, with big living areas and one to three bedrooms. It was to have been 11 storeys high.
The development partnership comprised John Baigent and members of the Gee family, who own garage and cabin manufacturing business Spanbild.
William Gee said they had other priorities, but did not wish to comment further. The advertising for their land is headed 'Change of direction – must be sold'.
The developers of both sites bought their land after the earthquakes, after apartment owners decided not to rebuild. Both sites came with existing use rights to build back to full height.
The agent marketing for the Verve land, Mark Macauley of Colliers, said the planned project had been 'a very big undertaking' and 'was not where the developers now wanted to be'.
'There are a number of apartments in town. The scale of this was pretty big.'
Would-be buyers of the vacant land included developers considering commercial projects, or residential developments which were more likely to be townhouses than an apartment tower, Macauley said.
Courtney Doig, also of Colliers, said while the Carlton Apartments site had a good location and a 30-m height limit, there was now more interest in developing low-rise terraced homes with two to three storeys.
'Their plans to develop were made a couple of years ago, when the market was in a different state,' she said.
The city council wants to increase the central city's existing residential population of 6000 to 20,000 this decade.
Christchurch has been described as not having a strong apartment culture. Real estate agents say some central city apartments struggle to compete with both the suburban house-and-garden option and terraced townhouses in inner suburbs.
The first 20 of the central city's east frame apartments finished in the Fletcher-Crown partnership development are for sale at $1.25 to $1.6m, with two of the cheaper homes sold.
Some other luxury apartment development projects in the central city have been abandoned or are being reworked following slow pre-sales of homes.