Convention centres, terminals, public housing at scale. The projects below span both sides of the contract — client and contractor — and every phase from feasibility to handover.
Contractor, consultant, client — and now adviser. The work below was carried from each vantage in turn. Knowing what the other parties are weighing, and where the pressure will fall, is not something a single seat teaches.
The client had a site in view and a clear intention: acquire it, develop it, sell the completed homes. What they didn't yet have was an honest answer on whether the project would actually stand up — technically or financially.
The work tested both. A site constraints assessment established what could physically be built. The regulatory pathway set out what would be permitted, and at what cost in time. Against that, a staged cash-flow model established what the development would need in funding, and when — which surfaced the real difficulty, because the client's own financial position couldn't carry it unaided. That extended the engagement into equity: identifying potential funding partners, opening those conversations, and modelling staged structures that might close the gap.
Every viable option was explored and put to the client with its numbers attached, alongside a recommendation on land use.
The recommendation was not the one the client hoped for. On the evidence, the development would not deliver the return required to justify the risk. They took the advice, and did not proceed. The value of the engagement was the investment they didn't make.
The NZICC is New Zealand's largest purpose-built convention venue — an exhibition hall several times the size of anything previously built here, a theatre seating close to 3,000, and an adjoining hotel linked by airbridge.
The role sat on the contractor side, holding design and construction coordination across a $55m work package within the wider programme. That meant working at the seam where design meets build: sequencing design releases against construction need, resolving buildability before it reached site, and holding coordination between structure, façade, services and fit-out.
A design-and-build contract with a guaranteed maximum price puts design risk on the contractor. It changes the discipline entirely — every design decision is also a commercial one, and a coordination gap does not stay a drawing problem for long. The value of the work lay in catching those gaps early, while they were still cheap.
Auckland Airport's Terminal Integration Enabling programme reshapes the existing terminal into a single facility serving domestic and international passengers together. Work Package 1 delivers a new baggage processing hall with shell-and-core floors above it, framed to accept the terminal's expansion. Work Package 3 rebuilds international check-in around self-service kiosks and automated bag drops, sized for the passenger volumes integration will bring.
The role was consultant-side, holding multidisciplinary design coordination across both packages from concept through developed design — architecture, structure, building services, baggage handling and airport operations all having to resolve into one coherent design.
What governed every decision was that the airport never closes. Nothing could be designed that could not be built in stages around live baggage systems, live back-of-house and passengers moving through the building the whole time. Constructability was not a downstream check on the drawings; it was an input from the first option tested. A design that worked on paper but could not be built without stopping the terminal was not a design at all.
Kāinga Ora's Auckland build programme replaces ageing state housing with warmer, denser social and market homes — the largest urban regeneration undertaken in New Zealand. Individual redevelopments run from a handful of homes to multi-stage sites of significant scale.
The role was client-side and end to end: a concurrent portfolio of more than $190m, with single projects reaching around $65m. Accountability ran from initial feasibility, through business case and investment committee approval, and into delivery — scope, budget, risk and quality throughout.
Public housing is constrained in ways private development is not. The funding path runs through governance, and a business case has to survive an investment committee before a spade moves. Sites are frequently small, awkward and encumbered. And the community around the work is the community that will live in it. Alongside the delivery portfolio, this work included land-use strategy across more than fifty complex sites — retain, develop or divest recommendations put to governance.
Projects marked Selected experience were delivered with the organisations named, before Reliancepier was established. They are presented here as evidence of the Principal's track record only.
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