Owners ‘progressing’ on Johnsonville shops
Residents of Johnsonville are ‘‘cynical’’ about a proposed $150 million redevelopment of the Johnsonville Shopping Centre, but the owners insist they are still planning it.
Nearly two years after receiving resource consent for the development, co-owner Stride Property’s chief executive, Philip Littlewood, said the owners were still in the ‘‘pre-development’’ or preparation stage.
The mall is 50:50 owned by Stride and Diversified Property Trust, whose main shareholders are Australian pension funds.
Residents will still have to wait months for any announcement from Stride on the redevelopment.
Littlewood said there was still a lot of preparation work to do.
Stride was not intending to make any announcement between now and its annual results in the second quarter of next year.
‘‘We are progressing with the development. By that I think you can take, and certainly what we have said in the past, which still holds, is that we still believe that Johnsonville Shopping Centre and the location have all the attributes, all the things we consider to be really important to create a contemporary high quality investment and asset for the community like we have been planning for Johnsonville.’’
But there were ‘‘gates’’ they needed to go through to give them confidence they had all the components buttoned down before they started a redevelopment.
These ‘‘gates’’ included commercial feasibility, getting investor approvals, leasing pre-commitments and other commercial components for a large-scale development.
Stride would update the market at the annual result but ‘‘whether or not that would be the full announcement on the project I can’t tell you at this stage’’, Littlewood said.
Asked if the owners were considering not going ahead with the redevelopment, Littlewood said: ‘‘ That is not our intention.’’
The resource consent plan would more than double the size of Johnsonville Community Association president Simon Pleasants
the mall and included 120 tenancies, 900 car parks and a cinema. The mall is about 11,500 square metres now.
Littlewood said occupancy was up, at 93 per cent compared with this time last year at 90 per cent.
The development plan in the resource consent ‘‘still broadly held’’ but there were always variations in these sorts of developments. A retail development of this kind was relatively complex with lots of moving parts, he said.
Supporting factors for it were the high level of disposable income of residents; its ‘‘topographical position’’ that was convenient for people in the Johnsonville Valley and Hutt Valley; Transmission Gully, which ‘‘drops the state highway at Johnsonville’s door’’; and rail close by.
Johnsonville Community Association president Simon Pleasants said Johnsonville residents were ‘‘cynical’’ about the project.
A new mall in Johnsonville had been talked about for 30 years but nothing had happened.
‘‘When you chat with local people in the area, what you hear is that they will believe it when they smell the diesel from the bulldozers. They are not going to believe talk any more. They are only going to believe action.’’
There had been talk about a boycott of the mall. ‘‘But what’s that going to do? It’s just going to harm local businesses,’’ Pleasants said.
Stride and Diversified owned not only the mall but a lot of land surrounding it.
‘‘It’s a company town,’’ Pleasants said. Stride was landbanking and profit-taking, he said.
Stride had ‘‘nice comforting words’’ but no motivation to develop the mall with big costs repairing Queensgate Shopping Centre after the 2016 Kaiko¯ura earthquake, he said.
Ohariu MP Greg O’Connor said the area had a great deal of housing growth, a lot of traffic by road and rail to the area, and presented a massive opportunity for a retail centre.
‘‘If it was in an area that was going backwards in any way or is even stagnant population-wise I would be more worried, but there is so much population growth in that area. I’m confident that it makes such commercial sense.’’
‘‘Local people . . . will believe it when they smell the diesel from the bulldozers.’’