Three Parks developer Allan Dippie, of Willowridge Developments Ltd, said earthworks for the sports complex started this week and would take a couple of months to complete.
''[The land is] going to be re-levelled to suit all the sports fields and re-contoured for the building and the car park and essentially that's obviously turning an undulating site into a flat, tabletop-type site.''
The Queenstown Lakes District Council will decide at its meeting next Thursday whether to build new Wanaka swimming facilities at the same Three Parks site. However, the pending pool decision had had no effect on development of the sports facility land, Mr Dippie said.
''There's quite an extensive site work and earthworks job to do over the whole [sports facility] site so that can proceed regardless of the pool decision at this time.
''It's 5.5ha on Willowridge's side of the fence and then there's another couple of hectares on the North Three Parks side of the fence site so it's a huge site really.''
Mr Dippie said his ''main mission in life'' was to complete Three Parks' main arterial road from State Highway 84 through to Ballantyne Rd next year.
''That will facilitate sports field access and [the facility] opening in 2016 hopefully.''
QLDC general manager operations Ruth Stokes said construction of the first stage of the sports facility was scheduled to begin next July at the earliest.
The council has budgeted $11.9 million for the work in the 2015-16 financial year.
More than 250 people attended Three Parks' first open day last month, and further open days were planned for next year, Mr Dippie said.
That was because the site would look ''substantively different then''.
''The last open day we had was so popular so we'll hold them sort of reasonably regularly ... as the project reaches certain milestones. And probably finishing all the earthworks for the sports fields will be the next milestone.''
