01
About HPA

28 years of shaping better communities.

HPA has been creating places for people to live since 1997. We help find the land, shape the village, deliver the homes and support the systems that help the community run well from day one.

A couple standing together outside their front door with a glass each, schist piers beside them and village rooflines running back toward the range.

02
Capabilities

Three core areas. One end-to-end team.

Site identification and analysis, feasibility, and the resource consent process. We think most of what decides whether a village works is settled at this stage, by the shape of the land and what the district plan will allow. Good design later does not recover a site that was wrong.

Concept development and master planning
Master planning involves the development of an overall spatial plan of your project, so that you can see its full potential at an early stage. This process ensures that HPA has a clear understanding of your expectations from the beginning. The initial master plan can also be a useful tool when trying to obtain funding from investors.
Feasibility assessment
Before committing to any major expense, HPA can provide you with a thumbnail feasibility. Working alongside our designers, HPA’s commercial team can model development costs and projected revenues, generating a range of options for your consideration; a task that would normally incur the costs of several different specialist design and financial consulting firms.
Raising finance
Our commercial team can guide you through the often-complex process of negotiating with banks or private investors to raise the required capital. HPA’s capital and operating cost estimation services give clients and potential investors a realistic indication of the finance required to successfully complete their project, from the outset.

Master planning, architecture and engineering are handled in-house. Homes are arranged around streets, not corridors, with amenities planned for the village it will become, not just the village that opens on day one.

Architectural and engineering design
Architecture is not about drawing buildings; it is about producing an integrated environment to enhance your lifestyle. Our experienced team of architects, draughtspeople and engineers consider elements such as acoustics, energy conservation and environmental engineering from the outset.
Electrical design, Technical Solutions
Technical Solutions came about as the collaboration between a company heavily involved in electronic design and manufacturing, and a company involved with the building industry in a design and installation capacity. It specialises in greenfields retirement village infrastructure, and covers security access, co-generation, photovoltaic, nurse call, IT and fibre reticulation.
Resource and building consent acquisition
As well as completing and submitting the required documentation, HPA will liaise with the local district council on your behalf throughout the lifespan of your project and handle any obstacles that arise while acquiring the necessary resource and building consents.
Market research and analysis
HPA uses market research companies experienced in the healthcare and retirement lifestyle sector to conduct research in the project’s local community, so that the designs match the needs and preferences of the people who will live there.

HPA manages projects and construction, with more of the build now delivered by our own teams. Villages are built in stages, allowing capital to be committed as the community grows and helping keep the development more resilient over time.

Project management
HPA’s project management team has extensive experience managing the development, planning, design and construction of aged-care hospitals and lifestyle villages, as well as hospital re-designs and extensions. HPA tailors its project management services to the needs of each client.
Construction management
Clients benefit from HPA’s national purchasing power through its open-book construction process. HPA regularly checks supplier and subcontractor prices against standard industry rates. Being based in the same offices, HPA’s designers and procurement team work together so the end product matches the approved design.
Sales and marketing planning
HPA provides marketing floor plans for all residential designs, and the commercial team can assist with the entire sales and marketing process for a villa, townhouse or apartment it custom-designed.
Financial and commercial management support
Once a lifestyle village or aged-care facility is established, HPA can assist with the management of its financial and commercial aspects, helping meet revenue targets and keep operating costs down.

03
The work

A glance at some of our villages.

Our two latest communities, both still taking shape.

Aurum on Clutha

Clyde, Central Otago

Amberley Country Estate

Amberley, North Canterbury

See every village

04
Under one roof

We take on the full journey, from bare land to lasting community.

A landowner, a planner, an architect, a builder and an operator, each answering to someone different and each gone by the time the next one arrives. Every handoff is a place where something can be lost. We do the whole job instead.

Finding the right opportunity

We find the land, prove the demand and secure the site. Only the opportunities that stand up to this process are taken forward.

Designed like a neighbourhood

Master planning, architecture and engineering are handled in-house. Homes are arranged around real streets, with privacy, natural light and outdoor space that feels like your own.

In-house delivery

HPA manages project and construction delivery in-house, with our own building and electrical teams working across each village. This gives us greater control over quality, timing and how each stage comes together.

Set up for long-term success

HPA brings feasibility, funding, village establishment, sales planning and management accounting together from the start. Because a successful village needs more than good design and construction. It needs the right systems.

Staying after handover

HPA supports village operations after residents move in, helping put the right systems, standards and support in place for the community to run well.

05
Who runs it

Meet our directors.

HPA is led by five directors with experience across development, design, construction, electrical and village delivery. Each brings a different perspective, but they work closely as one team and stay involved in the detail.

Gareth Newton

Chief Executive

Hamish Ward

Director - Development & Construction

Simon Kelsall

Design Director

Regan Sim

Electrical Director

Lee Eagle

Director

Gareth Newton

Gareth Newton is Chief Executive of HPA Group. His part in a village starts before there is a village, walking the land with whoever has owned it and listening to what they know about the place. Land held by one family for a long time carries things a survey will not turn up, and some of it ends up in the village.

He came into the sector through electrical engineering, and he came into it on site rather than from an office, in daily conversation with residents about what they needed and what made them feel secure. He says what people want changes with each generation, and that community and security do not.

The direction he sets the company is succession: keeping what HPA knows alive in villages that will outlast the people building them.

“There's a lot more soul in what we do than just straight engineering.”

Hamish Ward

Hamish Ward spent his teens and early twenties in the New Zealand Army and left after the Christchurch earthquakes to rebuild his home city. He started as a labourer on an earthquake repair at the University of Canterbury, signed up to an apprenticeship the same day, and spent his evenings at Polytech. He won the New Zealand Apprentice of the Year competition along the way.

He came to HPA to project manage Amberley Country Estate, choosing it over a stadium in Christchurch because his wife pointed out he would be three minutes from home. He plans every construction operation now and owns the quality system behind the build. He still spends an hour or two most weeks going back through a set of plans looking for a better way to do it.

“…you spend your whole life getting put into a box. Why would you want to retire into one?”

Simon Kelsall

Simon Kelsall studied architecture, worked, travelled, spent time at a London firm on high-end houses, and came home to New Zealand to get registered. HPA’s founder, Terry Coombs, took him on.

Master planning is his part: taking bare land and finding a village in it, in stages, over six to eight years of building. He holds that every site, every town and every client base is different, and that the moment the work becomes copy and paste it has already failed. The rest he calls attainable architecture: good houses, well designed, for everyday people. Fifty a year instead of one.

Early on he toured a building another company had just finished, in Tauranga, on an ordinary Tuesday. Residents began arriving and he assumed a function was starting. They had a cup of tea, talked for twenty minutes, and went home.

“No, that wasn't an event. That was just the community getting together for a cup of coffee. And I went, oh, I see what this is actually about. This is companionship.”

Regan Sim

Regan Sim grew up in Central Otago and did his electrical apprenticeship in Queenstown. He went to Australia and worked on mine sites and gas plants, came home, worked in an HPA village as a contractor, started his own business off the back of it, and came on board as a director. Clyde, where he is building now, is where he grew up.

He specifies heat recovery ventilation in every villa, so that a home stays warm and has fresh air moving through it rather than sitting shut up. On the day someone moves in, the internet is already on and the television goes on the wall. He is candid that it is a small thing, and does it anyway, because it is their first night in a new home.

“There's no blame, there's no, like, risk of these big variations, you know, because you're just working together for the same outcome, essentially.”

Lee Eagle

Lee Eagle was an electromechanical cadet with the Royal New Zealand Navy, then went into research and development, and came into the retirement sector from electrical engineering. His first HPA work was at Beetham Village in Gisborne, bare land being turned into a working village.

What he built there was the network that runs underneath a village: television, fibre, communications and power distribution, on the village’s own system. At the time that was a novel idea.

He can also say what HPA used to be: in the beginning it supplied construction crews and nothing else, to build the homes and hospitals. Feasibility studies, design, planning and council submissions came later and were rolled into one offer. He argues HPA should keep an interest in a village afterwards because it is the only way the knowledge goes back in, and not a build and drop job.

“You can say yes without any hesitation, categorically say that's a great place to live. No qualifying statement, bang.”

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The team

The wider team.

Behind the five directors is the team that carries the work day to day. Design, engineering, construction and the commercial team sit under one roof and meet in the same room, so decisions are made by the people who will have to live with them. Much of what HPA knows about how a village actually works comes from this team, and from staying close to each community long after the first residents move in.