Around the traps

By Christine Nikiel

Friday 31st May 2002

Wellington plans bulk retail centre

Wellington International Airport has announced plans to develop a $30 million bulk retail shopping complex on 4.7ha of land currently occupied by warehouses and older industrial buildings. The new centre will be competition for other bulk retail centres such as Porirua, which rely heavily on city and local shoppers. WIA commercial development manager Gary Craig said the new centre had a potential catchment population of 46,000. The centre was not targeting supermarkets, Mr Craig said, and would focus on homeware, hardware and general discount stores. The 18,5000sq m ex-Woolworths building will be refurbished and over 600 carparks will be provided on site. WIA was consulting neighbouring interested parties and hoped to lodge resource consent in six to eight months, Mr Craig said. All going well the centre was scheduled to open in 2004.

Westfield reveals Newmarket plans

Westfield is asking for public comment after revealing new plans for its controversial $300 million Nuffield St shopping and entertainment centre in Auckland's Newmarket. One major change is the reduction to only three retail levels. The building design is less block-like and now looks as though it consists of a number of separate structures. Westfield spokeswoman Sue Warren said the plans also included making Nuffield St more pedestrian friendly, with room for outdoor cafe areas and new traffic management proposals to divert traffic away from Broadway and bottlenecks. Consultation will last for one month.

Storage King offers secrecy

"We don't care what goes in there." Manager/director of Parnell storage centre Storage King Shane Frith will keep secret what goes into the six floors of lock-up boxes under his care. Because of the cut-throat nature of the storage industry Mr Frith would not divulge the number of customers SK has had since opening a month ago. But demand had been "better than expected" and SK was ahead of budget, he said. The 9200sq m centre is the largest in Australasia, and has the latest security to rival Fort Knox. SK's security system (Advent) includes 14 cameras watching every movement - all recorded on to disk rather than plain old video surveillance. Customers and would-be robbers have to get through three levels of hi-tech security - and then a padlock. And if an alarm is triggered the boys in blue will come running. All this adds up to about $500,000 worth of security, Mr Frith said.

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