A new five-star apartment hotel on Wellington’s Boulcott St is the latest addition to a large portfolio of serviced apartments owned and operated by Mike & Gay O’Sullivan whose extended family interests also embrace the region’s supermarket trade.
Built by Arrow International at a cost of $15 million, the eight-level Boulcott Suites include two penthouse apartments – available for $725 a night – which belong to a cluster of more than 180 centrally located units managed by the O’Sullivan-controlled Village Accommodation Group.
A registered valuer by profession, O’Sullivan co-founded Rolle Consultancy & Management, the property management business where his accountant wife remains as a director and major shareholder. However, the main game has been property investment, and over the years the couple has acquired about 200 inner-city apartments which are mostly held in companies directed by Mike but owned by Gay and associated trustees.
Perhaps the canniest investment of all was the acquisition of the Karori Mall in 1988 for about $3m. Twenty-eight years later, in 2016, the property was offloaded to Foodstuffs for an eye-watering $22m when the rateable value was just $13.6m.
Recognised by the Property Council in 2016 with the Orus Long Service Award “due to his outstanding performance in property and contributions to the industry,” Mike has also flirted with the occasional disaster during his long investment career.
As a director of St Laurence Ltd, he was issued with a formal warning by the Financial Markets Authority over potential breaches of the Securities Act in relation to a 2007 prospectus that the FMA says “failed to properly disclose information about loan quality and liquidity.”
Having co-founded St Laurence with Kevin Podmore in 1999, O’Sullivan resigned from the board two years before it went into receivership in 2010 owing 9000 investors $245m. They were both embroiled in the collapse of Albany City Property Investments which went into liquidation in 2010 owing $76.2m, which had been raised to build a new mini city on the outskirts of Auckland.
Interestingly, the St Laurence name survives in the form of St Laurence Securities Ltd, which is still controlled and owned by the O’Sullivan and Podmore families.
From a family of 11 children, Mike has strong business ties to his two independently wealthy brothers – Leo and Kieran – who own and operate the Hutt City and Petone Pak‘nSave supermarkets. The brotherly love extends to a joint -venture company called KLMOS Properties, combining their initials, which owns a multi-million dollar portfolio of mainly industrial buildings in Petone.
The family has also made its mark in philanthropy. A long-serving volunteer at the Mary Potter Hospice, O’Sullivan made a $3m donation in 2017 toward the construction of a new apartment complex. The couple abandoned plans in 2015 for a new apartment project on the historic Flagstaff Hill reserve and sold the plot to Wellington City Council for well below its valuation. Keen to give something back to the city, O’Sullivan said “we negotiated a very reasonable price provided the council agreed the land become a reserve.”
An enthusiastic member of Wellington’s SANZ Wheelers cycling group, O’Sullivan is known for vividly coloured lycra outfits, which his wife says provokes two schools of thought – “either nobody can say they can’t see him, or maybe this is such an eyesore we need to take it off the road!”