eKourier July 2016

PROPERTY

Spotlight On Hastings

L ocated in the Sunny Fruit Bowl of Hawkes Bay, Hastings is one of the two major urban areas in Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. The population of Hastings is about 68,200. Hastings is about 18 kilometres inland of the coastal city of Napier. These two neighboring cities are often called “The Bay Cities” or “The Twin Cities”. Hastings District is a food production region. The fertile Heretaunga Plains surrounding the city produce stone fruits, pome fruit, kiwi fruit and vegetables, and the area is one of New Zealand’s major red wine producers. Kennards Hastings was originally constructed on an old gas works in 2,000 and went through multiple expansions, it was then acquired by Kennards in 2007 along with a number of other New Zealand sites. Like most provisional sites we struggle to occupy the smaller size units of our range, due to the lack of apartment living, no University or large Polytechnic and the fact that most properties in the Hastings region have at least a single garage.

In October we made it a priority to increase our number of inquiries. We have seen our inquiries go from 563 in 2015 to 829 in 2016. With 517% more marketing emails sent and 516% more marketing letters sent. We found that by targeting residential areas that have a large number of rentals and carrying out mail drops and also identi- fying small businesses that only require a small amount of storage, we saw an immediate result. We will continue looking at ways to improve the number of inquiries. Some of the challenges we face at Hastings is the lack of comparable competition with only smaller privately owned sites being in the area. Our last CPA we were over twice the price across the board. This gives us a rewarding challenge of selling the customer on the Kennards experience rather than getting into a price war. The busiest time for our site in terms of people being here is between 1am and 6am as all the regions newspaper distributors work from the site.

a smaller site it is only manned by one Team Member on any given day. We have 409 units on offer which totals 3,536 square metres. We are currently sitting at 97.31% occupancy, we have been over 95% since March. We have set our sights high on achieving new milestones with our Asking and Actual rates. We wanted to achieve this goal by 01/04/17, but with the seasonal rent increase opportunities coming up in September and our Dynamic Pricing system we should reach our goals by October this year. Kelly Lang & Josh Johnston The Hastings Team

The Team at Hastings consists of Kelly Lang and Josh Johnston, being

17 Kennards Kourier July 2016