The KiwiSaver provider Simplicity has nearly doubled the size of its planned rental village near Queenstown, lifting the project from 600 homes to 1078 after buying another three hectares of land on the edge of one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
The expanded development will now sit on about 10 hectares near Remarkables Park, close to Queenstown Airport, and is being built specifically as long-term rental housing for people who live and work in the district rather than as holiday homes or short-stay accommodation. Simplicity managing director Sam Stubbs put it bluntly, telling RNZ that “there’ll be no Jafa ski houses, this is built for locals”.
That distinction matters in Queenstown, where the visitor economy has long competed with residents for a limited supply of houses. Nurses, teachers, police officers and hospitality staff have increasingly been pushed out to Cromwell, Frankton and beyond, then forced into long daily commutes to do the jobs that keep the resort town running. Stubbs has said the idea for the project grew out of exactly that problem, the sight of essential workers driving in from an hour away because nothing closer was affordable.
Simplicity runs its housing arm, Simplicity Living, as a way of putting money from its KiwiSaver and investment funds into bricks and mortar that produces both a steady return for members and homes that stay in the rental pool for the long run. It is a model known as build-to-rent, where a single owner holds an entire complex and lets the homes out on long leases rather than selling them off one by one. Tenants are offered rental terms of up to 10 years, security that is almost unheard of in the standard New Zealand rental market, where a year is considered a long tenancy.
The company is not new to the format. Simplicity Living recently finished what it describes as the largest build-to-rent complex in the country, at Mount Wellington in Auckland, and says that development is close to fully occupied. Simplicity Living managing director Shane Brealey said the firm sees strong demand wherever it builds, telling reporters the company has “extremely high levels of occupancy in our developments because of their quality and 10-year rental options”. The Queenstown project is the company’s first major move outside Auckland, and the jump from 600 to more than 1000 homes signals how confident it is that southern demand will hold up.
The numbers behind the project are substantial. The development is valued at up to 500 million dollars, according to BusinessDesk, making it one of the largest privately funded housing schemes in the lower South Island. The extra three hectares of land bought recently is what allowed the company to scale the plan up from its original size, first announced when Simplicity bought the initial block and signalled around 600 homes.
Simplicity has referred the expanded project to the Government’s fast-track consenting process, which is designed to speed up approvals for developments judged to have significant regional or national benefit. If that runs to plan, the company is aiming to start construction in January 2027. A project of this scale would be built in stages over several years rather than all at once, which means the full 1078 homes would come on stream gradually rather than landing in the rental market in a single hit.
Local officials have welcomed the plan. Queenstown Lakes Mayor John Glover said the development could “significantly support the well-being of our resident community”, a reflection of how acute the housing squeeze has become for a council that has watched its workforce hollowed out by accommodation costs. The district has some of the highest rents and house prices in the country relative to local incomes, and successive reports have warned that the local economy cannot keep functioning if the people who staff its hotels, hospitals, schools and shops cannot afford to live near their work.
What makes the Simplicity approach different from a typical subdivision is who ends up owning the houses. Because the homes are funded through KiwiSaver money and held by the fund rather than sold to individual buyers or investors, they are taken out of the speculative market entirely. There is no incentive to flip them, convert them to short-term holiday lets, or leave them empty as a capital gain play. The rent paid by tenants flows back to ordinary KiwiSaver members as part of their returns, which means the people renting the homes and the people indirectly funding them are often the same New Zealanders.
It is also a quiet shift in how large-scale housing gets built in this country. For decades the assumption has been that new homes are something you build to sell. Build-to-rent flips that, treating housing as a long-term income asset in the way that office towers and shopping centres have always been treated, and using patient institutional money to do it. Whether the model can be reproduced widely enough to make a dent in the national housing shortage is still an open question, but a 1078-home project funded by retirement savings and aimed squarely at local workers is one of the more concrete tests of the idea so far.
For Queenstown, the more immediate question is timing. With construction not due to begin until 2027 and the homes arriving in stages after that, the relief for workers commuting in from Cromwell is still some years away. But the size of the expansion suggests that, for once, the supply being planned is on roughly the same scale as the problem.
What do you think of build-to-rent housing funded by KiwiSaver money, and would you live in one of these homes? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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