Project: Island Hills Tenure Review
Converting Useable Farmland into Freehold Titles of around 3800 hectares.
The Challenge
Island Hills is a high country farm located west of Culverden in North Canterbury. The family who have farmed Island Hills for several generations, wanted to convert all the useable farmland into freehold titles. However, as there was a crown pastoral lease over the property, the family had to undertake a tenure review.
Tenure reviews give pastoral lessees the opportunity to buy some of their leasehold land. The remaining land is retired from the lease and returned to Crown control, usually for conservation purposes.
Fox & Associates were engaged to undertake a survey defining the new boundaries of Island Hills. Around 1600 hectares of remote wilderness was to be transferred into the Conservation estate, with the remaining 3800 hectares becoming freehold.
Our Expertise
Services included UAV aerial surveying and land surveying.
The Solution
Fox and Associates enlisted the skill and local knowledge of Hanmer Springs based Amuri Helicopters to help airlift our team into position.
As well as the new ridge boundary, we also had to define the boundaries of the many streams and rivers running through and around the property. Most of these were able to be digitised from aerial photography, but some were not visible and our field team had to fly or walk in to measure these.
Once the fieldwork was done the next challenge was to undertake all the calculations and format the survey data for upload into the Land Information NZ Landonline database.
A few issues were found in integrating the data into Landonline, which is where the Fox team’s experience in complex datasets and strong relationships with LINZ personnel paid off. All the problems were eventually resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and we could get on with preparing survey plans.
The Result
The survey saw Island Hills go from a lease of 5400 hectares to a freehold title of around 3800 hectares. As the survey was bigger and more complex than the average subdivision, there were a total of 37 sheets of plans.
To learn more about this project, read our blog Island Hills – Converting Useable Farmland into Freehold Titles
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