The Franklin Smith recruitment agency managing director said it gave him a bit of a fright initially.
"I remember seeing the headline in the paper and I thought, uh oh."
But after looking at the bigger picture, he did not believe it would have any significant impact on the business, which is recruiting construction workers for the new hospital.
"The acquisition of that site was not just for the hospital build.
"We’ve been renting a heap of accommodation in Dunedin which was costing us an absolute fortune anyway, not only to service the current outpost project but a number of other construction projects around Dunedin as well.
"We supply some main contractors and major subcontractors as well, at various levels, with people who have a skilled trade set.
"We’ve been finding the whole accommodation situation in Dunedin relatively tricky and costly, so we saw this [acquisition] as an opportunity.
Despite the government’s price cap on construction of the new hospital, Mr Higgins said the Leith Valley site was still a valuable asset for this project and any future projects in the city.
"For us, it’s business as usual.
"We’re pretty confident with where we’re at and what’s coming through, and we’ll take whatever the government do with that project — whether they scale it back, or the worst-case scenario of investing more into the current site.
"Time will tell and we’re not letting that affect us in any way, shape or form.
"Hopefully the project does move forward. It would be great for the region."
Mr Higgins declined to go into detail about what changes he had planned for the former camping ground, but he did say there were plans to build temporary housing on the site.
"We’ve got an overall plan of what we’d like that to look like, but we’re still looking through that at the moment.
"There’s a lot of accommodation there at the moment and we’re being pretty careful about creating the environment that we need.
"We’re not in a major rush, but we do plan to tidy the site up and make it safe and healthy for all those people on the site.
"It’s a long-term investment."
