Datasouth

Datasouth on the move

Tuesday, 20 November 2007 Originally published by the Christchurch Press.

A new office building going up in Canterbury Technology Park will fill the last major vacant site in the centre of the Burnside office park.

The development, by Millennia Developments, will see a $7 million office building completed at 30 Sir William Pickering Drive by next March. Most of the 20-year-old park is now fully developed, with the exception of some sites at the northern end around the newly created Sir Gil Simpson Drive. Millennia Developments is owned by Mark Blyth and Paul Williams, both directors of Armitage Williams Construction, the company putting up the building. Blyth and Williams have owned the land for about five years.

The site is the last chunk of the company’s one-hectare site, the rest of which it has already developed for state-owned traffic-control body Airways Corporation. Armitage Williams has also built premises in the park for Fulton Hogan on the opposite side of Sir William Pickering Drive, and a complex of nine small business units behind that.

Blyth says the latest project came about after an existing tenant - information technology company Datasouth Business Solutions - outgrew the premises Armitage Williams had built for it in Wairakei Road during the late 1990s. So Blyth and Williams are building the tenant new premises, a large two-storey building at 30 Sir William Pickering Drive. Datasouth will lease the ground floor of the development, while the developer is looking for tenants for the upper level.

Leasing agent Glen Steele, of Simes Ltd, says the ideal tenant would be someone looking for a large floorspace and carparking, “especially anyone tech-based or a government-type tenant”. Blyth says the decision to build big was largely a financial one. “With the cost efficiencies of building a building in this sort of place and size, it was cost effective to build it this way.” He says the finished project will bring in an annual rent of more than $550,000, and that his company intends to keep the completed building. “At this stage we are thinking we won’t part with it. “But if someone comes along with the right money, we’d have to ask ourselves.