Home truths
“We like to call it shaping reality,” says Mark Todd. “It is really satisfying to shape the market.” The co-founder of development company Ockham Residential is making a bold claim about his super-lot complex, Bernoulli Gardens, at Hobsonville Point. “For the same land purchase it’s generating twice the revenue, three times the houses, and twice the quantum of profit.” More homes desperately needed to meet Auckland’s housing shortfall and more profit. It sounds like an impossible dream.
Bernoulli is the first stop on a whirlwind drive around several of the maverick property developer’s latest projects, Todd’s response to a request for an interview about Auckland’s housing inequality. He talks a lot and without pause about the Auckland housing crisis, how he’s doing his bit to fix it and open people’s eyes to the benefits of apartment living, how difficult that is and what motivates him. We cover a lot of ground. He stops a couple of hours later when he literally runs out gas. “Too much talking,” he laughs. “I’ve never done that before.”
For now, as we push the car across the intersection and coast down the hill and up the other side until we can go no further, reality is shaping him. Unfazed, Todd talks steadily as we walk to a nearby gas station. He says he began Bernoulli Gardens about three years ago to show what could be done at Hobsonville, which was rapidly becoming just another elite unaffordable suburb. The average price of homes in this model — so-called medium-density nirvana — was heading towards $1 million.
Hobsonville wasn’t really within Ockham’s usual scope, which is firmly focused on urban regeneration, generally good-quality three- or four-, sometimes five-level apartment blocks in central but not CBD locations. Ockham apartments also tend to have weird names, often associated with mathematics or philosophy — Hypatia, Turing, Set, Ockham — and are mostly close to public transport, especially train stations. Todd recently called an apartment block Daisy. That caused broadcaster Mike Hosking to say that such a name was appropriate only for a cat or a dog. “Buildings should have bold
