A touch of The Block NZ comes to New Plymouth

A touch of The Block NZ comes to New Plymouth at new apartment complex

A new high-end apartment complex – which has been compared in style and design to the highly popular reality TV home design show The Block NZ – has been placed on the market for sale.

The boutique six-unit development in the centre of New Plymouth will feature many of the stylish interior design elements featured in the hit television series which pits four teams against each other to potentially win hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The New Plymouth apartment complex, to be known as Dawson Apartments, will comprise one two-bedroom and five three-bedroom residences. The apartment block is named after the street in which it is located – which in turn was named after distinguished British surveyor and geographic draughtsman Robert Dawson.

With two apartments per level, the Dawson Apartments range in size from 100-square metres of living space inside along with a 21-square metre deck – up to 141-square metres of internal living space with a 33-square metre deck. Apartment prices range from $1.15million up to $1.3million depending on room configurations and floor level.

The new apartment block is located in Dawson Street – a short walk to the city’s famous Pukekura Park. The six residences within Dawson Apartments are now being marketed for sale through Bayleys Taranaki. Salesperson Sandra Pickering said the upmarket residential development would bring a new style of previously unseen urban living to New Plymouth.

“While the architectural planning and interior design concepts for Dawson Apartments have been more than six years in the making, the resulting configurations and design elements which the developer finally went with show that his design team is very much ‘on trend’ with anything buyers would find in a new apartment complex in Auckland,” Sandra Pickering said.

“The design team opted for luxury over budget – calling for the likes of pure wool carpets and high-spec’ Bosch brand appliances, stacked aluminium doors linking the living areas to the balconies, spacious bathrooms, bedrooms with their own private decks, and natural New Zealand wood throughout the interior of the apartments.

“Many of the design aesthetics being offered at Dawson Apartments are clearly evident in the homes being created in The Block NZ – both in this season and the 2019 season when the contestants created four adjoining city-fringe apartments.”

Latest sales data from the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand shows that in July this year, the median sales price for a property in New Plymouth was up 17.6 percent from the same month in 2020 – rising from $510,000 to $600,000 in just 12 months.

The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand data also revealed that the average number of days to sell a dwelling in the Taranaki region was now sitting at 28 – much less than the 10-year average of 46 days.

“The REINZ data confirms our own market research in planning for the construction of the Dawson Apartments – reflecting a robust groundswell of demand for what in effect is a new sub-sector of housing in the city…. high end apartments as good as you will find in any of New Zealand’s bigger cities,” Sandra Pickering said.

“Our research into the sector identified that the likely buyer pool will encompass executive families - including some who have returned to New Plymouth as a result of the global Covid19 scenario – along with ‘empty nester’s moving out of their more suburban residences around the city and looking for a lower property maintenance lifestyle, and farmers from the greater Taranaki province who have sold up their rural landholdings but still want to remain in the region.”

Construction of Dawson Apartments is scheduled to commence by the end of this year, with the residences due for completion in the middle of 2023.

Sandra Pickering said there was every chance that off-the-plan buyers signing up to one of the new apartments now would enjoy capital growth on the residence during the construction phase.

"The price tags attached to the Dawson Apartments have been calculated on current market values and construction costs. As market values continue to stretch higher, albeit at levels lower than in some previous years, owners will be on an escalator ride of upward price movements in the wider real estate market,” she said.

The Dawson Apartments are located just 500 metres from New Plymouth’s central business and retail district, while the city’s popular coastal walkway - stretching from the port area north to Hickford Park - is located at the bottom of the road.

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