From April 1, tenants at Queenstown’s Remarkables Park shopping centre face a new annual charge of $1,300 plus GST per staff carpark. The centre has pulled 115 unsealed parks out of free staff use and left just 61 parks for 61 tenants. Any business with more than one employee who drives to work is already short. Centre manager Nick Lambert declined to comment, and confirmed the owners would not be commenting either.
For a small retailer in one of New Zealand’s most expensive labour markets, this is not a parking dispute. It is a cost-of-employment problem dressed up as a facilities change.
The maths that matter
Ricky Proctor, who runs Queenstown Furniture Gallery and BedsRus, had his staff allocation cut from eight parks to four. Buying back those four spaces would cost him $5,200 plus GST a year. A business with five staff needing parks faces $7,150 plus GST, on top of what Proctor describes as already exorbitant rent.
Leigh Jackson, Specsavers’ retail director in Queenstown, has 13 staff on his books and seven in-store daily. He is weighing up paying $1,500 each to lease spaces for himself and his business partner. His bigger concern is what comes next: “I’m waiting to see whether my staff have issues and end up complaining or end up looking for other jobs because they can’t park freely where they need to.”
Jackson believes some tenants will reconsider renewing their leases. If they do, the centre loses anchor businesses and footfall. The property owner is not in the room when those decisions get made.
Workers who already cannot afford to stay
Queenstown’s average worker earns $69,788 a year, 12 percent below the national average. Hospitality wages sit at just $28.51 per hour, barely 2.4 percent above the national rate. Meanwhile, average weekly rent is $707 versus $573 nationally, and rents are at their least affordable level since 2000, consuming 27.2 percent of average renter income.
Shauna O’Sullivan of Remarkable People recruitment puts it plainly: people take jobs and then leave within a week or two because they cannot afford to live there. Adding a parking charge, or the daily hassle of finding a free park that no longer exists, pushes the equation further against the employer.
Queenstown’s disappearing parks
This is not happening in isolation. More than 230 carparks have disappeared from Queenstown’s CBD since July 2019. On Park Street alone, parks halved from 98 to 49 and all 93 all-day free parks were eliminated. On Robins Road, 47 all-day parks were removed.
Mike Theelen, QLDC’s chief executive, has acknowledged the consequence: local services have been priced out of the CBD, changing the retail mix. Nationally, the Ministry of Transport estimates the total economic cost of parking at $14.7 billion per annum, but parking fees are paid on only 1 percent of all trips. The cost is mostly hidden in rents and goods prices. When a landlord unbundles it, someone has to pay.
Crown-funded silence
Remarkables Park Ltd is not a struggling landlord scraping for revenue. The company is developing a $45 million Research and Innovation Queenstown facility backed by a $22.5 million Government loan. The project had to be redesigned from five levels to three-and-a-half after construction costs rose, but it remains a major publicly subsidised development.
A property group that has taken $22.5 million in Crown money, is converting free staff parking into a revenue line, and refuses to explain itself publicly deserves scrutiny. Economist Dr Eric Crampton makes a fair point that parking is never really free when spaces are scarce. But pricing parking only works when workers have alternatives. Remarkables Park is a car-dependent suburban centre with no meaningful public transport. The 2020 National Policy Statement on Urban Development removed minimum parking requirements, which made sense for dense urban areas. In Queenstown’s suburban commercial zones, the effect is to remove any structural floor without providing a replacement.
The precedent other landlords are watching
If Remarkables Park gets away with this quietly, other commercial landlords will notice. The removal of parking minimums means there is no regulatory backstop. Every parking cost increase in a market with no public transport alternative is a de facto wage cut, absorbed by either the employer or the worker.
The solution is not regulation. It is transparency from landlords who take public money, genuine competition in commercial parking supply, and transport infrastructure that gives workers an alternative to a car. Queenstown has none of those things right now. Until it does, the tenants of Remarkables Park are subsidising their landlord’s balance sheet with money they do not have.
Sources
- ODT: Anger over cuts to staff parking (2025-04-01)
- RNZ: Demand for staff in Queenstown higher than ever – but people can’t afford to live there (2025-03-31)
- Lakes Weekly Bulletin: Onwards, not upwards for Remarks Park
- ODT: Queenstown parking, by the numbers (2024-10-01)
- Ministry of Transport: Domestic Transport Costs and Charges (2022-08-01)
- ODT: Queenstown parking squeeze ‘killing CBD’
- Breaking Views: Dr Eric Crampton on parking pricing (2026-04-01)