Simon Hendery

Real estate: Bay asking prices almost as high as Wellington

A shortage of listings in the Bay has fuelled the expectations of people wanting to sell property here. They’re now asking almost as much for their homes as sellers in Wellington. According to the latest Trade Me Property Price Index, Hawke’s Bay vendors are asking an average price of $545,100 for their properties, up a "staggering” 23.2 per cent...

Roosters: 2 decades of brewing at the red shed

From a business perspective, craft beer and coffee have a lot in common, says Chris Jarvis. As the long-time owner of Hawke’s Bay’s Bay Espresso cafés and now also the proprietor of landmark Hastings brewpub Roosters, he should know. Chris and his wife Jonelle bought the Roosters business – on the industrial fringes of Omahu Road, where it’s been brewing...

Hawke’s Bay Brewing Co: from beer tankers to boutique bottles

Craft beer wasn’t a big thing when Hawke’s Bay Brewing Co started out way back in 1996. In fact, the company’s CEO Greg Forrest jokes that in those days, “craft” was probably a homebrew beer and drinkers didn’t even know how to spell the word. It was a time when the brewing industry was all about volume production of a...

Bursting onto the global scene

When disaster strikes, a growing number of air-borne emergency responders around the globe are fighting fires with helicopter fire buckets designed and built in Napier. Fourteen years after starting a Hawke’s Bay engineering company with a $20,000 loan, Richard Lane now runs a specialist helicopter equipment business with a growing list of international customers. “In 2004 I started off with...

Getting our share of the Provincial Growth Fund lolly scramble

The government has a billion dollars a year to dish out for regional development initiatives, so will this region get in on the action? Hawke’s Bay is in line for tens, or possibly even hundreds, of millions of dollars’ worth of funding through the government’s $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund (PGF). Local councils and other backers of several large projects...

Skills shortage holds back growth

Despite the great weather and lifestyle opportunities, Hawke’s Bay employers are struggling to fill key vacancies. What’s behind the region’s skills shortage? It’s a problem that’s all too common across a range of Hawke’s Bay firms: business growth is being held back because companies simply can’t find the skilled staff they need to expand. Richard Lane employs 16 people at...

Zeelandt Brewery – connecting the old and new

It doesn’t get much more Kiwi than this: a brewery run out of a large steel shed just off the Napier–Taupo highway. There’s even a Kingswood ute parked outside. But on closer inspection, there’s also a strong European vibe at Zeelandt Brewery in Eskdale. Zeelandt is the Dutch province New Zealand is named after and founder Chris Barber says he...

Project a winner for business and charity

It’s a fundraising mission with a difference: fitting out an aging 40-foot container to give it a new lease on life. Repurposing the large, blue shipping container into a multipurpose, habitable and consented transportable building is a major task for the small team at Architecture & Interiors Ltd. Once the months-long ‘Life Box’ project is complete, the container will be...

Boxing clever: building a business out of a shipping container

From coffee outlets to homes and offices, container buildings are springing up all over Hawke’s Bay. What’s driving this trend and what are the advantages of doing business out of a metal box? It started in 2011 when Al Borrie opened 'The Box’ – a modified shipping container transformed into a coffee outlet in Clive. Another container café – Tamara...

Irongate Industrial Zone – Opening the gate to development

Irongate, south of Hastings, has long been earmarked as a “dry industries” hub and as the regional economy continues to boom, that vision is finally being realised. Head south out of Hastings along Maraekakaho Road and just outside the city limits you hit a busy industrial patchwork of large and small businesses – some old, some new – sprinkled between...