Exit Auckland: ‘The new
Sometime in the middle of next month Chris Gudgin will pack up his belongings, his wife Alex, his Yorkshire Terrier Nacho and his Auckland salary and move 500km southeast from packed city suburbs to a little red house on a big town section in Gisborne.
Gudgin is a product manager for Albany-based tech company The Straker Group, which this year asked their 38 New Zealand employees — they’ve got another 82 in nine overseas offices — if they wanted the head office moved into the city centre, so a wider range of the city was available to younger staff struggling to buy their first home in the country’s hottest property market.
Actually, some staff told company founders and owners Merryn and Grant Straker, an office in regional New Zealand would be better.
So in June, the company opened an office inside Launch, Gisborne’s new tech hub, starting with two employees, growing to nine by this month and, with four or five actively considering joining them and keen interest from overseas staff, likely to reach 20 in the next year, Grant Straker says.
When Gudgin and wife Alex arrive in New Zealand’s eastern-most city, district-wide population 43,653 at the 2013 census, they won’t be without friends.
And as they turn the key on their new, $260,000 three-bedroom home — their first — it won’t just be the front door that opens.
So will a future that seemed so elusive as they tried, and failed, for three years to buy a home in Auckland, most going for $100,000 to more than $200,000 over their budget, offering less floor space, virtually no outdoor area and a 30-year mortgage, rather than a 10- to 15-year one.
Now, the couple are talking about gardens and renovations and, yes, babies, Gudgin says.
The 30-year-old, a born and bred Aucklander, is a quiet achiever — he’s not shouting from the rooftops about the exciting change in his life.
But he’s thinking about it, and all the good things that once seemed beyond reach.
All the struggles of life biggest city will soon be a memory.
“We’re not thinking about Auckland [anymore] . . . this is a stage in our lives, a milestone, and it will take us in a certain direction in life.
“The possibilities are endless.”
Gin our distant
udgin is the first of The Straker Group’s staff to, quite literally, put a stake in Gisborne’s much more affordable soil.
Other workers, some with young families, have also transferred to the regional office, and they too are casting a keen eye over the city’s housing stock.
Among them is married dad-oftwo Jiro Sasamoto, who will switch from renting in Greenlane to househunting in Gisborne at the end of the year.
Any nerves are easily dismissed by the lure of a more relaxed lifestyle, and the security of knowing the roof over his kids’ heads will be theirs.
“It means stability for my family,” Sasamoto says.
It’s a sentiment Grant Straker knows other workers share.
Gudgin and Sasamoto won’t be the last to secure their futures in Gisborne’s bricks and mortar, and that’s how Straker thinks it should be — for his own staff and for others.
“I’m a great believer that people should be able to get onto the housing ladder at a younger age,” Straker says.
“We believed the housing market in Auckland was a broken system and that we needed to try and help some of these staff, especially ones with young families, or looking to start a family, get on that pathway.
“Housing here, it’s like a quarter of the cost [of Auckland]. You’re not talking about a 10 or 20 per cent difference, you’re talking about hundreds of per cent difference in the cost of a house — there’s no way you could ever pay them enough to be able to afford that.”
And, they’re happier, the 53-yearold says.
“They’ve still got a great job. The work we do is not mundane stuff, especially for the tech team. This is probably as technically challenging and rewarding as these guys are gonna get.”
It was a house, two in fact, which started him on his own business pathway, when the former British Army paratrooper turned engineering graduate and then computing whiz formed The Straker Group with Merryn in 1999.
The couple, who each owned a house when they met, sold both and put everything into starting and then building their business.
“We didn’t even have a house for a while. We risked everything to grow our business.”
For its first decade The Straker Group focused on multilingual content management platforms, which are systems for running large websites in multiple languages, but eight years ago they expanded into translations, a major — and much more lucrative — switch, Straker says.
The newer arm of the business involves translating content into different languages, achieved by a mixture people and machines.
“We decided the $50 billion industry was the better place to be, rather than the $1b we were in at the time.”
About 90 per cent of their business comes from overseas and tomorrow Straker Translations Group (STG) will be listed on the Australian Stock Exchange at an opening price of AU$1.51, giving it a market capitalisation of $86m.
The company has offices scattered around all points of the compass, from neighbouring Australia and relatively close Hong Kong, Tokyo and Denver to far flung Barcelona, Cologne, Dublin and London. And now, Gisborne.
It wasn’t just about helping his young workers put a roof over their heads. There’s a bigger picture, too, Straker says.
He doesn’t want “selling each other houses” making the Kiwi economy go round.
“The way that you issues is through empowerment.
“In New Zealand we seem to have fallen into the trap that everybody’s a hero if they’re at the bottom of the bloody cliff with an ambulance.
“The way you solve it is through economic empowerment and then we never end up down there and we don’t end up being well known for all the bloody charities and things that we do, and that’s not to knock those, it’s just to say that it’s the wrong way to look at it.
“The right way to look at it is if you solve social economic empower people with jobs, with meaningful jobs, and you bring economies into the regions, then New Zealand is going to be a much better place. And it can’t all be centred in Auckland.”
If you empower people with jobs, then New Zealand is going to be a much better place. Grant Straker
When his staff first put a regional office on their wish list, Straker looked at Rotorua — where the West Auckland native spent much of his childhood — and South Waikato, where his Nga¯ ti Raukawa marae is.
But Gisborne’s cheaper housing and beaches proved more enticing to his staff, the internet speeds are as good as Auckland, and the decision was settled when Straker was a judge for a hack-a-thon in the city and spoke with Gisborne mayor Meng Foon.
Foon told Straker there was local support for tech firms to come to the city, including a relocation grant from the Eastland Community Trust, and the longtime mayor is delighted his pitch worked.
“It’s fantastic to have them here, we welcome the new world, well it’s not that new really in terms of the technology, but if we can cluster an incredible group like Straker that will be the catalyst to encourage other firms to think about Gisborne.”
The trust’s relocation grant of