This is a guest post by Malcolm McCracken. It previously appeared on his blog Better Things Are Possible and is shared by kind permission.
In 2023, I published the following post on the plans for the development of land that was formerly part of the Carrington UNITEC Campus. Two years on, as the first residents are about to move in, what has progressed? What do we know about the next stages of development?
The first two buildings were officially opened on Thursday, 18 September, by the Mayor of Auckland, Wayne Brown and the Minister of Housing Chris Bishop.
The first building, Toi (the one clad in green brick, in a pattern inspired by harakeke), is a Build-to-Sell development with 65 units ranging from studios through to three-bedroom homes. It also has a ground-floor communal lounge which opens onto a play space. The retail space has been tenanted by Avondale cafe and icon Ol’Mate.
Toi and Whētu deliver a combined 142 new homes along with commercial and communal spaces (Photos: Malcolm McCracken, 2025).
The second building, in the reddish-brown brick, is called Whetū. It has 77 apartments, including 27 studios, 2 one-bed, 18 two-bed and 18 three-bed apartments, which will be operated as Build-to-Rent for the foreseeable future, due to slow sales. These buildings progressed thanks to central government’s Residential Development Underwrite, which provided backing for 56 of the units.
Enabling infrastructure
The majority of the enabling trunk infrastructure has now been completed and is open to public use. This has seen the existing road network upgraded to current standards with upgraded lane widths, crossings, drainage, footpaths and cycleways.
New streets are also delivering an upgraded cycleway along the Waterview Path, and will filter vehicle movements through the site
(Photos: Malcolm McCracken, at various stages in 2025)
The future of the former Carrington Hospital building, aka Building One, remains uncertain. It falls within the Ockham-Marutūāhu part of the development, but they have not announced anything to date. (Ed: a community campaign has held hopes of seeing it adapted as a space for community, creative arts and wellbeing, and completed a feasibility study in 2022).
However, an upgrade to the ‘Northern Open Space’ appears to be underway, which was indicated in the consent plans for the enabling works. This should include an upgraded open grassed area, new playground as well as new pathways, seating and planting.
Upgrades to the Northern Open Space, in front of the former Carrington Hospital Building, are underway (Photo: Malcolm McCracken, September 2025. Map credit: Boffa Miskell)
Bonus pic, hot off the presses: a cool-looking adventure playground being installed in front of Building One/ adjacent to the NW shared path. (Image: supplied)
Additional land was purchased in 2021 and 2022, totaling 7.6 hectares, and was not included in the original masterplan design. In recent months, some enabling works have started on these parcels. This includes the construction of a new road to open up ‘B Blocks’ for development, which connects into the UNITEC Mt Albert Campus.
Additional land purchases for housing (shown in light blue) were completed in 2021 and 2022, and new street connection through B Block (Photo: Malcolm McCracken. Map credit: Boffa Miskell).
Works are also underway to upgrade the formerly quasi-public spaces with new pathways that will support better connections through the site and passive recreation for residents, students and others.
New paths and plantings along the Wairaka Creek are underway and Central Wetland (Photos: Malcolm McCracken, 2025)
Carrington Road is the main arterial that serves the area and sits along the eastern frontage of the site. Auckland Transport is currently seeking resource consent for an upgrade which will widen this stretch of the road to add bus or transit lanes, and will add protected bike lanes that connect through to both the Mt Albert and Point Chevalier Town Centres. At Mt Albert, residents will be able to transfer to a train that will take them through the City Rail Link.
This upgrade is supported by Central Government through $112m of funding from the Infrastructure Acceleration Fund. Construction is expected to start in 2026.
Illustrative images of what Carrington Road will look like post-upgrade (Auckland Transport)
What we know about future development stages
Ockham-Marutuahu have released a staging plan indicating the order of the next three stages of development, along with future stages within the streetblock that include additional green park space. Notably, this plan does not include already consented apartment and supermarket development on corner of Carrington Rd and Te Ara Kokō Wai (previously Farm Road).
Plans for future stages of Ockham and Marutuahu Maungārongo Development (Ockham Residential)
Stage 2 will see Building 7 (see plans below) progress. This will deliver a permanent, centralised carpark building. Centralising the parking enables vehicle movements to be concentrated into areas designed for this. Laneways between buildings will have vehicle access controlled via bollards (see photo below).
Renders and layout plans from resource consent documents (Ockham Residential).
Bollards! Photo by Malcolm McCracken
Timing for housing development in the Ngāti Whātua section of the site remains unclear. Enabling works are nearing completion, though. Waiohua Tamaki have one development of 509 homes consented through the Covid-era fast track process. However, this is now being held up due to a court order, as it would replace a community garden.
Summary
It was 2018 when the Government first announced it was purchasing most of the UNITEC Campus for housing. While it has taken several years for it to get going, what has progressed to date feels promising. I still believe this can eventually become one of the most dynamic and liveable parts of the city thanks to it being planned as a walkable, mixed-use neighbourhood, centred on sustainable transport access and upgraded public spaces.
However, timing of development remains uncertain – with a slow economy, Build-to-Sell will remain slow. As more sections are completed, the vision for the site will become more apparent and interest may accelerate, as we saw with Hobsonville Point. However, Build-to-Rent may also have to play a greater role in the short-to-medium term. Watch this space!
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Build-to-rent because of slow sales? Is this a sign that Aucklanders don’t want to live in apartments, or a sign that the market is massively over-inflated and about to come crashing down?
With net emigration (presumably for a time only) and uncertainty among young people about their jobs (including among professionals and young families that might be most likely to buy such higher-end apartments), I am not too surprised sales are slow. In my view it says very little about apartments, and more about the general “vibe”.
Building homes that that need to trade on their ablity to provide a home rather than their somone trying to get capital gains?
Build to rent is a far better model than ownership for apartments. They need holistic long term management, one entity doing this is far easier than getting the every single owner on the same page.
“one entity doing this is far easier than getting the every single owner on the same page.”
Good body corporate rules and a long-term maintenance fund (which is now mandatory!) can also achieve this too.
Arguably, the worst would be a scattered ownership of absentee landlords just trying to make the biggest short term profit, which is not exactly likely for this higher-priced building category, at least not for some decades.
I’m not against build-to-rent at all, the article just seems to frame it like they were never intended to be BTR and are only being released as BTR due to lack of purchasers.
They’re priced decently high for what you get, especially when they don’t come with carparks. Long term I think they’ll be okay, but in the short run they need to create a gravel carpark. The two main issues with them are price and parking. If they’re not willing to budge on price, they need to allocate some of the land nearby to be a gravel carpark and guarantee spots in the future carpark building.
Hi Freddy, they have built a temporary surface carpark across the lane from the apartments.
Isn’t it temporary though? Like, if I bought a place, in a few years time when they redevelop the next site I’ve got no carpark, so I’m left with an apartment with no carparks. And although carparks add a lot to the cost of an apartment, similarly they add a lot to the sale price of the apartments.
There’s two train stations 15 mins walk away
Bus stops on Carrington
Protected cycle lanes linking to most successful bike path in country.
Younger buyers will take this into consideration when deciding whether or not to shell out extra money for a cash-sink combustion machine
Younger buyers haven’t. The flats have been on sale for a pretty long time. Issue is that prices are to high for what the market is prepared to pay. Demand for these excellent apartments at this price is sadly not present.
Investors don’t want to buy a flat without carparks, especially not in NZ where most investors equal capital gain with owning land. Young urban buyers don’t have enough for a deposit and when they go to bank of mum and dad they get told to either buy a CBD apartment or buy a townhouse. Buying a flat, 15 minutes from a train-station without a carpark isn’t sufficiently appealing to most Aucklanders. If the price was substantially cheaper than an apartment in the CBD or your Ponsonby/Kingsland I am sure there would be demand. But this is next to Unitec and sadly opposite the buildings there are some less desirable neighbours that (and we all know it shouldn’t) affect demand,
Yeah, the housing market and economy in general is absolutely pumping so it’s definitely that Aucklanders hate apartments.
Exactly. Houses down to 2019 values and long clearance times.
Is this a sign that Aucklanders don’t want to buy houses, or a sign that the market is massively over-inflated and about to come crashing down?
What are the plans for the car parking building? Divvying up spaces to the yet-to-be-built and existing apartment owners? Sold seperately? Unreserved?
How is the carpark building planned to be used? Existing (and new) apartment owners get the spaces divvied up? All for sale separately? Majority unreserved?
Car parking is leased or purchased separately from the building. There are overall parking restrictions (car parking numbers VS dwellings) across the area.
So they plan to build the car park building off Gate 2 road. Which is going to be left-in, left-out at Carrington Road because they want Gate 1 and Gate 3 to be signal intersections.
Nice to see progress on this development.
Apartment sales are slow because the economy is in a pretty terrible state in Auckland, and house prices are low and construction costs are still pretty high. General rule of thumb is that the apartments have to cost less than 80% of the price of houses or else they won’t sell. The government also destroyed the market by stopping the KO build program, which paid the bills for many of these apartment developers, and getting rid of kiwibuild. Most of the apartment projects I’ve been involved with were using the kiwibuild underwrite to help get bank finance. Without it they are stuffed – note that this project only went ahead because of a government underwrite (i.e Kiwibuild 2.0).
I wonder how long Taylor’s Laundry will stay on the site, it is currently the biggest eye sore in the whole area. Great to know the land has been purchased from them though. Its really the sort of business that should be operating on Rosebank Peninsula or Elerslie.
This is an exciting development!!! They have done a wonderful job with the colour scheme too.