KEY POINTS:
Property owners say the Auckland City Council's proposed bylaw to ban existing billboards will substantially strip their buildings' earnings and capital value.
Owners of one apartment building get $100,000 a year through leasing to one of the biggest billboards in the central city.
City councillors hearing submissions on a billboard and signs bylaws review heard that rental was at the high end of the scale.
Alf Jamieson, of Media 1, said most buildings with a 6m x 3m standard billboard would probably get from $10,000 to $20,000 a year rent.
The Wiltshire Apartments building has the TVNZ billboard on the corner of Hobson and Victoria Sts.
The building's body corporate secretary, Darren van der Wal, said the building faced SkyCity and had a high exposure to the tourism market.
Measuring 10m x 20m, the billboard was registered with the council in June 2006.
The body corporate leased the billboard to the company Isite.
He said the significant income helped with a commercial responsibility to improve and upgrade and maintain the 1996 building.
Questioned by the hearings panel, Mr van der Wal said loss of signage income meant the 57 apartment owners would have to contribute an extra $100,000 a year to operating costs.
Most of the apartments were rented, with 70 per cent bought as property investments.
"Having spent a considerable resource in lawfully establishing the billboard, there is now considerable concern that the legal right can now be struck out simply with the stroke of a pen," said Mr van der Wal.
"The resulting increase in body corporate levies of 50 to 60 per cent is simply not sustainable for those individual owners."
He predicted a long-term impact of degeneration in the character and type of owners and occupiers of this apartment building, with flow-on social effects on the central city area.
Brian Cameron, who owns Delta House in Anzac Ave, said it had a licensed billboard since 1983, which earned $40,000 a year.
Wiping that income would also take $330,000 off the capital value of the building, in the view of Bayleys Commercial agents.
"We have an existing legal right to continue our business or be fully compensated for our future loss."
Mayor Dick Hubbard sat in on the hearing yesterday to hear submissions by Guy Herbert, owner of a building at the intersection of Broadway and Khyber Pass, Newmarket.
Mr Herbert said the building had a long-term agreement for a registered 6m x 3m billboard that faces traffic coming from Khyber Pass into Broadway. "It is an important source of revenue for the building and has added to the value of the building," said Mr Herbert.
Mr Herbert said there were only 346 billboard sites in the city. Commercially, billboards were only justified where they were capable of being sighted by either high foot or vehicular traffic.
"It is an abuse of the law-making process for the council to confiscate rights without compensation and or destroy the democratic right to express one's view [on billboards] whether it be commercial or non-commercial."
