Shane Brealey and Sam Stubbs of Simplicity Living at the new productivity hub at the Reiputa build-to-rent housing scheme, 80 Mt Wellington Highway. Photo / Michael Craig
Shane Brealey and Sam Stubbs of Simplicity Living at the new productivity hub at the Reiputa build-to-rent housing scheme, 80 Mt Wellington Highway. Photo / Michael Craig
Apartment development specialist Simplicity Living will next month open a new productivity hub at its largest build-to-rent scheme in Auckland, showcasing how it has improved the speed, cost and quality of its projects compared to many others.
“We desperately need more houses,” said Shane Brealey who was accompaniedby Sam Stubbs, founder of KiwiSaver provider Simplicity.
They showed off the new suite which includes a model of a revolutionary exterior wall-building system called Stackcell Structures, invented by Brealey and a colleague.
Simplicity is inviting Australasian construction, architectural, project management, quantity surveying, engineering, development and government representatives to the hub open next month.
The hub has the name is K.I.R.S.T.E.N on its central wall, standing for “keep it real simple team efficiency node”.
Simplicity Living is building nearly 300 new apartments at 80 Mt Wellington Highway. Photo / Michael Craig
The under-construction Reiputa (whale tooth neck ornament) is at 80 Mt Wellington Highway and is to be a 12-level $225 million project where work started in March, designed by Brewer Davidson Architects.
The profit margin is to be $71m before interest, put at around $16m, giving total net profit around $55m, according to figures shown on the productivity hub wall.
The hub has gone up beside the site office. Both are accessed off the Mt Wellington Highway towards the Ellerslie Panmure Highway end. The hub opens on July 1 with booking details to be finalised closer to the time.
“We’re opening this to try to explain how there’s a faster, better cheaper way to build medium and high-density residential and we can share our intellectual property so that others can pick it up for housing quality and volumes. We might be able to help others get their feasibility to work. Maybe the asking price for the homes doesn’t need to be quiet as high as it is with the current cost model,” Brealey said.
Formwork and steel in place for the floor slab of the first apartment block at Reiputa, 80 Mt Wellington Highway. Photo / Michael Craig
Already, a group of Australian build-to-rent specialists plan to visit, Brealey said.
Formwork and structural steel are laid for the floor slab to be poured of the first apartment block at the site between the highway and Te Horeta Rd, only about a minute’s walk from the Panmure train station.
Brealey said around 700 foundations would be driven down 22m deep via a revolutionary method: Olivier Piles, a patented drilling displacement method performed without soil being removed or the noisy and disruptive thump-thump sounds which marks most piling jobs where pile-driving rigs are used.
Reiputa is Simplicity Living's new scheme for 80 Mt Wellington Highway. Photo / Simplicity Living
Under the Olivier system, piles are drilled into the ground via a rig concrete is poured directly in.
An Olivier Pile is screwed into the ground without vibration, the soil being displaced sideways instead of being dug up. No soil is transported to the surface, Brealey and Stubbs said.
Brealey and Reiputa project manager Brandon O’Reilly invented the Stackcell Structures walling system where concrete is poured into formwork on site using plywood casings inside and out, structural steel at the core and recycled plastic battens and clips.
Shane Brealey and Sam Stubbs of Simplicity Living at the new Reiputa build-to-rent housing scheme, 80 Mt Wellington Highway. Photo / Michael Craig
Using those piling and wall methods meant Simplicity Living went faster, cheaper yet produced better buildings, Brealey said.
His former business, NZ Living and the new business Simplicity Living, have now built 12 apartment schemes so Reiputa is the 13th. Therefore as a developer, he had a chance to learn how to go faster, cheaper but better.
Stubbs said only 4 per cent of New Zealanders live in apartments, compared to 42 per cent of the population in OECD countries.
“Why? Because New Zealanders’ experiences of apartments are terrible. Most apartments are horribly built,” he said, criticising them for leaking, being small and those on Hobson St in the CBD as some of our worst.
Simplicity bought the flat site at 80 Mt Wellington Highway from Foodstuffs North Island. Photo / Michael Craig
Reiputa units would be around 15 per cent larger than average with full-sized kitchens and 2.7m stud heights instead of the usual 2.4m, Stubbs said.
One-bedroom units are planned to be rented for $625/week and two bedrooms for $675/week.
That is much cheaper than Resido, NZX-listed Kiwi Property Group’s new build-to-rent three-tower apartment scheme beside Sylvia Park: units start at $697/week, two-bedroom two-bathroom 90sq m places are $921/week, while the same number of bedrooms and bathrooms in a 76-80sq m place is $889/week.
Brealey said Simplicity Living aimed to charge rents 5 to 10 per cent beneath market rates due to lower management costs, lower vacancies and an “optimal outcome” in terms of building the projects which allowed “fair” rent.
Brealey is now overseas, studying off-site manufacturing in Sweden, Denmark and Vancouver. He plans to meet world-leading construction expert Professor Mark Farmer on the trip where he and wife Anna will study build-to-rent schemes overseas.
On-site wall-building and a revolutionary method of driving piles or foundations into the ground are hallmarks of Reiputa, 80 Mt Wellington Highway. Photo / Michael Craig
