Cashmere Club sells land for new housing
Saturday, 16 November 2024
New housing will be built on land owned by the Cashmere Club in Christchurch after the heavily indebted club decided it must downsize to stay afloat.
The club has its clubrooms on 1.5 hectares between Colombo St and Hunter Tce in lower Cashmere, and has labelled its financial situation as “fragile”.
It now has a contract to sell 2980m² of land facing Colombo St to local housing developer Brooksfield. The land is now a mix of green space and car parking.
Brooksfield has planned a development on the site it is calling Cashmere Gardens, with 13 homes to be built in the company’s usual heritage replica style.
The club’s general manager, Murray Davies, said the board decided to look for a developer to buy the land, after rejecting the idea of developing it themselves. He said after speaking to several developers they choose Brooksfield “as the best fit with the area”.
“We are in a recession, and people don’t have as much money to spend,” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of land costing us a lot of money in rates and insurance and maintenance.
“If we didn’t sell the land it would be a tough ask to survive the way things are at the moment, and there’s a good chance there wouldn’t be a Cashmere Club. Then there’d be virtually no community assets in the area for functions and for groups like Probus to use.”
Davies said to make up for the lost space, they would create more car parking on the Hunter Tce side of the property, which cannot be built on because of its proximity to the Ōpāwaho Heathcote River.
The homes in Cashmere Gardens will be in townhouse, cottage and apartment styles, with two or three bedrooms, either a garage or off-street parking, priced at between $689,000 and $1.15 million.
The company says one of the 13 is pre-sold and 10 are under offer. Like Brooksfield’s other homes, all are designed in what it calls a classic revival style by English architect Ben Pentreath.
Since launching in 2020, Brooksfield has built about 320 homes in Christchurch.
While the agreed price for the piece of land has not been disclosed, it is understood to be considerably more than its rating value of about $1.25m.
Like many other chartered clubs around the country, the Cashmere Club has been negotiating higher costs in a tough hospitality trading environment.
The club’s premises has bar and restaurant facilities, sporting facilities, pokie machine areas, and meeting and function rooms, which it hires out. It has about 2670 members, a significant jump from three years ago, and has been open for almost 50 years.
In its latest financial report, to the year to March, the club said its board was “working tirelessly to right the club financially”.
Last year the club lost $24,000, down from $326,000 the previous year.
It has a $1.62m loan from the BNZ bank, a $36,000 loan to Inland Revenue, and paid out $151,000 in interest last year, up from $111,000 the previous year.
The report says that despite the financial loss, “the turnaround has been pleasing in all aspects of the business.
“The board is under no illusions that the club’s financial situation, whilst showing improvement, is still fragile,” it says.
It intends to put the sale proceeds “towards the term loan, reducing the principal down to a more serviceable level, which will in turn reduce ongoing interest costs”.
It is also planning to spend some of the proceeds on building maintenance and improvements.
In 2019, the club began leasing land to the Christchurch Squash Club, which built a new five-court pavilion on the property in a 35-year arrangement. Last year, the squash club’s annual lease payment for the land was $23,000.