When we first mentioned to a mate of mine in construction the idea, he told us it would be a five year project. Given the wheels were kind of in motion we initially thought that was crazy talk, but it didn’t take long to realise how accurate that call would be.
Creating a subdivision takes time, expertise, negotiation and of course money. There are a number of tickets to clip. Given it was the very first stage for us, probably a nice taster of things to come really. Given you are chopping up land within district and city councils laced with regulations, a process was to be expected looking back, we just didn’t realise how much. The first hurdle was gaining a title, something we would need to purchase and transfer from another farmer in the area.
A title is part of our legal system. Every piece of land and property gets a title, it is how it works in NZ for keeping records of who owns what. Effectively it is the legal ownership paper that records information on who the owner is, the property details and all the elements you would expect identifiable to an area of land like easements etc. In regards to a subdivision, put simply you need more than one title to be able to add another property on the piece of land you have.
Each council has a plan when it comes to allocating subdivisions. When you look at all the districts in a region on the map, each is set into a particular zone. The council decides on zones based on land use and activities in those areas, this could be residential, commercial or rural like us. When we set out on this project, there would be only three ways we could get a subdivision.
1) A Boundary relocation between neighbours (not happening with our neighbours)
2) A Conservation Subdivision where a block of native planting meets ecological standard and the council strikes a deal with you in exchange for a subdivision (not enough land to make this happen)
3) A title transfer (bingo)
The title transfer was actually unique to Franklin area originally, and has a pretty interesting history to how farmers actually got more titles, then how they came about as a marketplace.The intention of the old 4ha block subdivision rule was promoted by the Council in the 1980’s as an option to farmers because at that time they believed that a 4ha block could be economically productive.
Farmers were initially sceptical about it, but eventually they started using this rule to create some smaller titles on their farms. Many did not sell these new smaller blocks but chose to hang onto them as they actually needed to keep farming the land to keep their overall farming unit financially viable. Roll forward to 2010 and the Council realised that there were still a lot of these smaller undeveloped titles of land around the district and with the value of land increasing they identified a risk of these vacant small holdings being sold off as lifestyle blocks. This would see them being lost from the larger farm unit and the overall productive potential of the district would fall. So the Council introduced the transferable title rule to enable farmers to sell their spare titles and keep their land.
The 2016 council unitary plan was looking to be stopping the transfer system to protect rural land. This would mean our window would be pretty slim to get all of this sorted and actually have the chance to build. As you can tell all of this is a pretty tricky process to be going through, and you certainly need specialist help. We partnered with Craig at The Survey Company who was an absolute legend at getting us through the minefield of steps required. The title would turn out to be one of the easier ones ahead of us!