Mall sold in $40m deal
Property group ends plans to build apartments at Highbury
An Auckland mall has changed hands for around $40 million after NZ Retail Property Group quit the Highbury Shopping Centre at Birkenhead, ending its plans for five residential apartment towers.
Campbell Barbour, group general manager, said the property had been sold, handled off-market in a transaction which settled in May.
“We’ve got so much to do. We’ve got Westgate and Milford. We’re still playing with that,” he said of apartment plans and an expanded retail centre offering at Milford.
Barbour yesterday opened the NZ Council of Shopping Centres national conference in Auckland and disclosed the sale before the event. He is also the council’s chairman.
Barbour said he could not name the buyer and that he had not been closely involved in the deal.
Last year, NZRPG planned a new shopping centre and residential community at its Highbury property on the corner of Mokoia Rd, Onewa Rd and the Highbury Bypass.
Five big luxury residential apartment towers up to about 12 levels high were planned with large decks. Beneath the towers was to be a vastly expanded shopping mall.
“The vision for Highbury is to create an integrated, mixed use centre with residential apartments, greater public amenities and invigorated retail,” NZRPG said last year in its presentation. “NZRPG has a large scale vision for Highbury’s redevelopment. It anticipates it will not only transform its own property, but be the catalyst for an acceleration of the ongoing regentrification of the Birkenhead town centre.”
A company spokeswoman said at the time that the Highbury image was “a conceptual vision for how we could create an integrated retail and residential space on the Highbury site. It’s by no means an absolute and it’s simply an exploration of how we could position a mixed use development on the site with retail on the ground level.”
NZRPG is owned by private interests of Mark Gunton who also owns other shopping centres including Milford and Westgate, and the lease to a large South Island farm.
Some of the mall’s stores include ANZ, Westpac, Countdown, The Warehouse, Burger King, KFC and Rodney Wayne.