Next on the block is a $30 million-plus complex comprising a 40-room four-and-a-half star Quest hotel on two levels. Above will be three levels of 29 two- and three-bedroom residential units, called Nevis Apartments.
A marketing campaign for 24 of those units launched this week.
Opposite Wakatipu High, the Red Oaks Drive building is next to Safari Group’s Wyndham Garden, which opened with 75 serviced apartments and 55 residential units last year.
Safari Group’s Ramada hotel, which opened three years ago, is around the corner, while the company’s also planning a Ramada Kawarau River complex – 87 serviced apartments and 97 residential units – nearby.
Also close by, a Chinese company is proposing a five-storey, 182-room hotel called Lakeview Gardens.
And slated for the corner of Red Oaks Dr and Mountain Ash Dr are four- and five-star hotels and Horizons Residences – 149 spacious apartments.
Meanwhile, New Ground Capital is building Toro Apartments – 230 units designed as workers’ accommodation – across three high-rises below Remarkables Park Town Centre.
Like the developers behind these other complexes, Queenstowner John Eckhold and Dunedin’s Carl Angus, directors of Tingo 41 Ltd, are building at Remarkables Park as it’s a sunny, flat location in the fast-growing Frankton Flats hub, close to the airport and Remarkables Park’s shopping centre and other retail, and handy to public transport and the eastern access road.
Critically, this area’s also close to the conference centre and gondola to The Remarkables skifield proposed by Remarkables Park’s Porter brothers.
Tall buildings in this area afford stunning views, too.
The location’s “extremely strategic”, Eckhold says.
Like many other Remarkables Park buildings, theirs has also been designed by Dunedin’s Mason & Wales Architects.
Eckhold’s hoping construction will start in August/September for completion by the end of next year.
They’ve engaged Envision Eighty20 Ltd as project managers after their original choice, Arrow International, went into voluntary administration.
Eckhold: “We just think it’s a far better idea to restrict it to just longer-term rentals.
“You get the situation in most of these other apartment complexes where you’ve got permanent residents living alongside Airbnb [visitors], so every three or four days a new lot comes in and it’s ‘party central’.”
He thinks the units will attract a mix of rental investors and owner-occupiers.
Bayleys Queenstown and Bayleys’ Auckland-based projects team are marketing 24 of the units – two have sold already while the developers are retaining three.
The two-bedroom units are priced from $749,000 and the three-bedders – for which dual key access is available – are selling from $1,079,000.
Local Bayleys executive director Stacy Coburn thinks the units will especially appeal to Auckland and Australian investors, “and there’ll be some regional interest”.
