Much aroha

Jules MacKinnon grew up with a mother who owned, let, and managed about 12 properties. It was hard work, she remembers — a 24/7 cycle of maintenance, repairs, and rent chasing that Jules herself tried to avoid by embarking on a career in nursing.

According to Jules, it was in public health that she began to see, first-hand, some of the issues that poorly built homes were causing, mostly to low-income earners who were at the mercy of sometimes unscrupulous landlords — her mother not falling within that category — or drafty, leaky, and mouldy structures.

“Substandard housing had a direct impact on health outcomes,” she says, “and we were sort of the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.”

So, when Jules’s mother wanted to retire, the then-reluctant ‘landlady’ and her partner, Blair MacKinnon, decided to take on the legacy and do things with an emphasis on well-being.

At that stage, the MacKinnons owned a property at 26 Aroha Avenue in