New Zealand Sub Dividing Help Needed

hi – Cross lease is less than half the cost of a standard fee simple title but there are other issues to consider!

I Buy Property http://www.cashflowproperties.co.nz

I live in the South Island of New Zealand. The costs differ from council to council. Here is a breakdown of subdivision costs in Richmond (near Nelson). The example is a section that is subdivided into three titles:

Plan for resource consent 3,000.00

Consultant 2,500.00

Application fees 3,600.00

Surveyor & engineer 14,000.00

Tasman District Council 29,590.00

These are real and uptodate figures. If you have some more questions, you could email me at: [email protected]
I’m doing developments with spec houses.
Cheers
Mary

Hi there

I have only subdivided in the North island, however the first step is to get a surveyer to visit the site and give you the low down. they measure it, give you a time-frame, exact run down of costs, etc etc

There is a lot to it i.e. where are the services, access, right of ways. There is a legal part of it too but this comes much later. The answer as to how much it costs is soooo ‘it depends’. And only the surveyer is qualified to suss it out for you really. They can also pretty much handle the whole thing for you, even advise you who is a good lawyer to use to complete the subdivision (someone who they deal a lot with is always good as they have a relationship.)

allow 6-12 months for the whole process, even if they say ‘3-12 months’. You will find that it’s a whole lot of hurry up and wait. Council say they take ’20 days’ to process an application but it might take you three months to get to the ’20 days’ and then council come back with some silly tweak and then you have to allow more weeks for surveyers to re-submit and then another ’20 days’ blah blah ad nauseum. you might find it a quicker process in the South, but I’ve done subdividing in Rotorua (very very busy, backlog etc) and Northland resource consent (took a year, sloooooowww aaassss aaaa wet weeeeeeeeeeeekkkkkk) so don’t be like impatient if you want to go through the process!!! however it is a very good way to add value with basically not a hell of a lot of work or (relatively) expense. Also touch base with an agent before you start to estimate the resale value of what you’re about to do. In some places it’s not worth the hassle and expense, there has to be a certain ‘tipping point’ of land values and demands before it’s worth doing. I.e. i wouldn’t necessarily start subdividing willy nilly in taumarunui for instance. Not quite yet, but maybe soon (Gee that town is going off!)

cheers-
barb

Hi MiniMogul,

Thanks for your post. I’m looking at a possible sub-division of an existing block of units in Hamilton. Have you ever done this before? We’ve spoken to a surveyor who had a quick look and said it should be pretty straight forward.

I’m thinking of tying the subdivision to the settlement date on the S&P agreement, but this would only make sense if we could realistically complete the titling within about 4 months.

I’d appreciate your thoughts on this. Thanks.