A businessman's bid to leave the Christchurch earthquakes behind, in favour of Dunedin's warehouse heritage precinct, has the backing of the Otago Chamber of Commerce.
However, a Dunedin City Council hearings committee is expected to take up to 10 days to decide whether the project can proceed, after considering an application for resource consent yesterday.
Under the proposal by former Dunedin man Paul Williams a new business, Wine Freedom, would be established inside the 129-year-old refurbished NMA building at 49 Water St.
The building would house a distribution hub for mainly online sales, as well as a boutique retail store, office space and education facility, operating six days a week and employing two full-time and one part-time staff.
Mr Williams told the Otago Daily Times he had been living and working in London before returning to New Zealand in 2010 with plans to settle in Christchurch or Auckland.
He began re-evaluating those plans after landing in Christchurch two days after the September 4, 2010, earthquake, and eventually settled on a move south to Dunedin to establish his new wine business.
"We were in a position in Christchurch where our money was in the bank. We weren't tied up in housing and everything else.
"We quickly realised we had better opportunities outside Christchurch."
His year-long search for a premises had since led him back to Dunedin for the first time in 14 years, and to the Water St building he hoped to lease.
However, his bid - originally a non-notified, non-public application - was against district plan rules, which zoned the Water St building for large-scale retail use, a report by council senior planner Kirstyn Lindsay said.
His plans become public yesterday after council staff referred it to the hearings committee for an interpretation of district plan rules.
The planner's report questioned whether an "undesirable precedent" would be set by allowing the business to operate from the building, but concluded it would not and recommended consent be granted. Committee chairman Cr Colin Weatherall said the committee's decision had been reserved and would be released within 10 days.
Otago Chamber of Commerce chief executive John Christie said he had detected a significant increase in interest in Dunedin's commercial and residential properties coming from Christchurch.
The number making the move south was difficult to quantify and still not "huge", but he believed the warehouse precinct could be an attractive option for smaller, more mobile companies, he said.
If that met the council's plans for the warehouse precinct, "then I would have thought that would have been a sensible solution".
"I think we've got the potential to attract a lot of like businesses down to that area over time, as that snowball starts to gather a bit of substance around it," Mr Christie said.
