Stan Hickey built a business that outlasted him by decades, then one buyer ended it

Fifty years, undone in seven months

Rotorua’s Hickey Contractors closed at the end of June 2026, one month before it would have turned 50. Founded by Stan and Sonja Hickey in 1976, the firm built subdivisions, site works and commercial and residential projects across the Bay of Plenty for decades. Its closure put 12 full-time employees and an estimated eight sub-contracted workers out of work.

The brand had passed through several hands since the Hickeys sold it more than 25 years ago. Auckland-based Mark Long bought it in November 2025 and wound it up just seven months later. Stan Hickey was philosophical, telling the Rotorua Daily Post it was “a sign of the times. It is tough out there”. He pointed to out-of-town contractors moving into Rotorua when their own work dried up elsewhere: “They come in and take the work off the local contractors.”

The mechanism that kills established firms

Hickey’s diagnosis is not folklore. It is exactly the dynamic the industry is describing at a national level. Carl Taylor, chief executive of the CBS Co-operative, which represents about 2,200 building members, in July 2026 called the current slump “the worst he has seen since 2015”, setting aside the short Covid shutdown. He described builders selling completed townhouses “at, or very close to cost, simply to free-up capital and keep their businesses moving” and warned that this is “not a sign of a healthy market. It’s a sign that cash flow has become more important than profit.”

On the competitive squeeze Hickey named, Taylor’s framing matches: “There’s still a smaller pool of work. So the guys are competing for that smaller pool by lowering their margins, lowering their labour, and lowering their total profitability and trying to win work.” An established regional firm with a higher cost base cannot win a price war against displaced contractors willing to work at cost. That is what closed Hickey as much as any single event.

The Du Val shadow

There is a sharper thread. Long is linked to Du Val Property Group as a high-performance coach and observer, and was reportedly set to become a director not long before it went into receivership in 2024. Du Val, founded by developers Kenyon and Charlotte Clarke, was placed into receivership by the Financial Markets Authority and was later reported as owing $268 million.

Whether Du Val’s collapse affected Long’s ability to run Hickey is not established. But the pattern is what matters. When Du Val fell, it left a trail of unpaid subcontractors. In 2024, one subcontractor claimed to be owed nearly $200,000 and had laid off staff, with Aniket Bapat of Deccan Property Services describing the sum as “a major portion of my turnover for a year.” MBIE in 2024 investigated whether retention regulations had been breached, the law requiring firms to hold subcontractor payments in a separate account. The people adjacent to a quarter-billion-dollar collapse were, months later, running a 50-year-old regional contractor.

The numbers say the downturn is not done

The macro backdrop explains why firms keep falling over. Total construction activity fell 7.8% to $58.1 billion in 2024, then a further 4.1% to $55.7 billion in 2025. There were 551 fewer building and construction companies in business at the end of 2025, about half of them in multi-family dwelling construction, the very segment Du Val operated in.

Stats NZ data for the year ended December 2025 put the value of building work at $31 billion, down 7.2%, with construction filled jobs down 3.6% and Auckland alone losing 3,936 of them. And the most recent figures show no let-up. Stats NZ’s March 2026 quarter data shows seasonally adjusted building volume down 3.5% on the prior quarter, with building value of $7.2 billion, down 5.9% year-on-year.

There are green shoots. 36,619 new homes were consented in the year to December 2025, up 9.0%, and MBIE projects recovery to $65.4 billion by 2030. But that is only 3.8% above 2023 levels, meaning a full recovery barely gets the sector back to where it started.

Where the real risk sits

For B2B readers the lesson is about exposure, not sentiment. The visible cost of Hickey’s closure is 20 lost jobs. The less visible cost sits with the subcontractors, suppliers and service providers who extended credit assuming continuity. Firms that survived 2024 and 2025 by shaving margins are now the most fragile: less buffer, more stressed creditor relationships, and no room left to cut. The recovery in the forecasts has not arrived in the volumes, and when it does it will not land evenly. Regional operators in secondary markets like Rotorua will be the last to feel it, and the ones extending them credit should price that risk accordingly.

Sources

• Rotorua’s Hickey Contractors closes ahead of 50th anniversary (2026-08-01)
• Inside New Zealand’s shrinking building and construction industry (2026-07-12)
• New Zealand builders selling new homes at cost as the construction downturn deepens (2026-07)
• Building New Zealand: Focus on the construction industry (2026-02)
• Value of building work put in place: March 2026 quarter (2026-06)
• Du Val receivership: Tradies, cleaners left out of pocket (2024-08-12)
• Du Val receivership: MBIE investigates subcontractor complaint (2024-08-13)