The receivers managing Shundi Customs, the failed developer of Auckland’s 56 storey Seascape tower, have filed an initial report showing the company owes creditors close to $600 million, a sum almost twice the project’s original $300 million budget.
According to the report from Calibre Partners, total claims against Shundi Customs stand at $588.9 million. China Construction Bank, which appointed the receivers in March, is owed $133 million as the largest secured creditor. Related parties tied to the wider Shundi group are owed $372 million between them. A further $71 million is owed to unsecured creditors, a category that includes around 166 apartment buyers who paid ten per cent deposits years ago and now have no guaranteed path back to their money.
The National Business Review put China Construction Bank’s overall exposure higher at $171.1 million once debts from another stalled Shundi project, Tamaki Village, are added to the bank’s claim. Either way the lender is the only party with the kind of security that gives it a strong chance of recovering its full position from any sale of the half finished tower on Customs Street East.
Construction on the 187 metre Seascape began in 2017, with apartments originally promised for completion in 2021. The structural frame was topped out before work halted in August 2024 following a dispute with the main contractor, China Construction New Zealand. A construction adjudication ruled Shundi owed the builder around $33 million, the payment was not made, and the site has stood as a silent shell on the waterfront fringe ever since.
The figures in the receivers’ report are striking even in a sector that has already absorbed a string of large Auckland failures since 2022. Shundi was always a thinly capitalised local vehicle for offshore funds, with the Shanghai based Shundi Group standing behind it. The $372 million owed to related parties suggests much of the money that built the structure flowed in through intercompany loans rather than third party debt, which is why so much of the debt sits inside the group rather than with external trade creditors.
Calibre Partners’ Brendon Gibson and Neale Jackson have said their immediate focus is keeping the site safe and secure while a sale process runs through Bayleys Real Estate and Knight Frank. The campaign has been pitched offshore as well as locally, with the receivers and agents acknowledging that domestic appetite for a half built 56 level apartment block is limited. Estimates of the cost to finish the building range from $120 million to $300 million on top of any purchase price, and prospective buyers have raised concerns about steel reinforcement that has been exposed to the elements for nearly two years and curtain walling that may need to be redesigned.
Conversion to a 500 plus room hotel has been floated as an alternative use, along with a play for Active Investor Plus visa holders who have to direct capital into approved New Zealand investments. None of those scenarios make life easier for the buyers who paid deposits during the 2017 to 2021 marketing phase. Most of those contracts were signed when the apartments were promised on a 2021 settlement date. Deposit holders have been told their money sits in trust accounts but cannot be returned while the receivership runs its course, and that any new owner of the tower would not be obliged to honour the original contracts.
For Auckland the wider question is whether the city’s downtown can absorb another large speculative high rise without offshore funding lined up to the finish line. Seascape was one of three big residential towers proposed for the same waterfront stretch during the late 2010s, all of which sold heavily off the plans. The Pacifica nearby was completed and the Park Hyatt residential component finished as part of a hotel, but the Seascape model of selling mostly to overseas investors and funding through related party loans has now stalled in spectacular fashion.
The receivers’ report does not yet include a recovery forecast. That depends on the sale price, which Bayleys has declined to put a range on publicly, and on whether China Construction Bank chooses to credit bid the property or accept cash from a third party. The Shanghai parent has not commented on the local company’s collapse, and Shundi’s New Zealand directors have not made themselves available for comment.
Reporting from RNZ, the NBR and the NZ Herald has detailed the breakdown of claims, and interest.co.nz covered the original appointment of Calibre Partners in March.
What do you think Auckland should do with the Seascape shell, sell it for whatever it fetches, push for hotel conversion or something else? Leave a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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