PHOTO: ALDEN WILLIAMS/STUFF – The long lake-frontage at Lake Hawea Station.
A sprawling lake-front farm in Central Otago has sold for $17.5m – not long after taxpayers paid more than $2m to get rid of it.
It is the latest in a string of farms once owned by the Crown that have been privatised then on-sold for substantial profit.
An academic says it is a “spectacular example” of the extraordinary capital gains made by on-selling valuable lake-front land the Crown privatised. The Government department responsible, however, said its original deal was a fair representation of the land’s value, and it had secured access to an important walking trail for the public.
For many years, the 11,300ha Lake Hawea Station was owned by the Crown and farmed under a perpetual lease. That lease was broken up in 2011 through a land reform process called tenure review.
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