Bowled over: Cricket legend joins locals in fight to save ‘the heart of Pegasus’

Saturday, 23 May 2026

A property developer wants to convert Pegasus town’s 18-hole championship golf course into housing. The town, and the land it sits on, has a tumultuous history, but a group of locals is determined to ensure this won’t be Pegasus’ last stand. MICHAEL WRIGHT reports.

Wednesday morning at Pegasus golf club and you wouldn’t suspect a thing. The course looks crisp; a smattering of weekday players keep a leisurely rate of play; the ducks and pukeko are simpatico.

But look closer and the levels in the water hazards are down. The bunkers need more sand and there is a single SUV in the car park in front of the clubhouse. The decal on the side reads Wolfbrook Residential.

Last week, it emerged the Christchurch-based property developer had bought the golf course land in a mortgagee sale. The price, The Press understands, was about $6 million. A steal for 77 hectares of undeveloped land in a largely built town.

A Wolfbrook vehicle outside Pegasus golf club this week. The development company has just bought the property.

But the real bargaining may be yet to come. The land has a special purpose zoning and dismayed Pegasus residents are ready for a fight to keep it that way.

A group has been battling since March, when Pegasus Golf Ltd entered liquidation. Club members chipped in to keep paying one of the greenkeepers and helped maintain the course themselves, spraying bunkers and pulling weeds. It was a stopgap solution, they thought, until a new owner came in. They had not been enamoured with the old one, Xiangming (Sam) Huo, who they considered less interested in golf and more interested in developing a $100m resort complex with hotels, a spa, swimming and hot pools, a country club, golf school and apartments, only for it all to fall through.

“The anticipation would be that we would finally have a golf operator [as owner]”, club member Grant Elley said. So Wolfbrook’s entrance came as more than a surprise. “Confused, destroyed, anxious … it was completely shocking.”

Pegasus’ 18-hole championship golf course is the marquee attraction in the town.

Elley owns one of the 100 or so homes in the Mapleham enclave, nestled between State Highway 1 and Pegasus proper, that overlook the course. One of the first residents there was former cricketer Sir Richard Hadlee. He and his wife were members one and two of the golf club. Now firmly retired (his son in Auckland has his clubs), he lives further back in the town, overlooking the lake, but was no less appalled when he learned of the golf course’s fate.

“I was absolutely shocked to be honest,” he said. “Everyone thought it would be taken over by somebody who was interested in golf… To see it chopped up and disappear is hard to take, really.

Standing in front of Elley’s veranda, he points. “We used to live over there … [and] it was living the dream, basically. Played golf three times a week.

Matt James, Grant Elley and Sir Richard Hadlee are among Pegasus residents planning to fight Wolfbrook’s development plans.

“Look at that half-built house there. If I’d just retired now and I want to play golf, what do I do?”

The first thing residents are doing is mobilising. A meeting is planned for June 2. It was to be at the Woodend Community Centre but has moved to the larger Pegasus School Hall due to interest. Pegasus Residents Group president Matt James, who doesn’t golf, is just as animated as Elley and Hadlee.

“It’s the heart of Pegasus. It's that vibe of Pegasus. In the original concept it was kind of a leisurely feel. We have the golf course, we have the lake ‒ that’s the dream that people bought into.”

Pegasus residents bought into a certain kind of lifestyle when they moved to the town.

Then there’s the basic logistics of development: roads, pipes and the accompanying blizzard of consent applications. “The school's packed already,” James said. “You can’t get into the doctors … even today, the roundabout [at] State Highway 1 is a nightmare at commuter times.

“There’s all these other things which are not just about golf [and the] owners adjoining a golf club, it’s about a community.”

Turbulent times

Former Waimakariri mayor David Ayers opposed the Pegasus development in its early stages, while he was the district’s deputy mayor, but now feels for residents facing potential infill housing: “There is a Pegasus sense of community there.”

Pegasus has been through a lot in its short life. Back in the 90s, the site was earmarked for landfill by the Waimakariri District Council. When that came to nothing (turns out swampy coastlines aren’t great places for burying millions of tonnes of rubbish) the land caught the eye of several developers before Infinity Group impresario Bob Robertson emerged.

Robertson, an experienced property developer, had something different in mind for Pegasus: a master-planned town, the first of its kind in New Zealand, built in one fell swoop. It would cater to “the traditional Kiwi family”. For Pegasus, Robertson said, “I’m acutely keen to create what I would like to consider would be as close as possible to an ideal town.”

Among those with raised eyebrows was then Waimakariri district deputy mayor David Ayers. A geography major, Ayers knew communities didn’t just happen. “I opposed it,” he said. “You end up with a town where no-one knows each other. They didn’t have what I would call social infrastructure ‒ all those community groups that you find in well-established towns.”

So it went with Pegasus. The grand commercial precinct never materialised. It developed like any other subdivision might ‒ slowly, albeit with a golf course and a lake. By 2012, Pegasus Town Ltd defaulted on a $142m payment and went into receivership. It was sold to Todd Property, owned by New Zealand's wealthiest family. Today, it offers a modest commercial hub. Most things a settlement of 4000 residents might need. The council has nearly finished building a community centre.

Ayers approves more of what Pegasus has become. The residents group, now led by James, has helped foster exactly what he thought was missing from the original pitch. “There is a Pegasus sense of community there, and I think that’s all for the good”. He visits “quite often”.

Luckily, not to play golf. After the members resurrected the course in March, they have been able to keep playing, but that will soon end. Wolfbrook has allowed them access until June 1, Elley said. The community meeting is the day after that, where the big question will be what the town first promoted as “live where you play” will do next.

“We’ve all got an emotional attachment to the thing,” Hadlee said. “And we can get very emotional now with what is happening but we’ve got to be very clear in what we say.

“It’s zoned for a golf course, and the new developers have to come in and try and rezone it through their application and we want to be part of that process.

“We want to have our say.”

Wolfbrook did not respond to requests for comment this week.