The 40-year-old, who cut his teeth working for 12 years for veteran local developer David Broomfield, has developed The Tiers, through his company Alpha Properties, on a steep 2.8-hectare site off Frankton Rd that others had been put off due to its rocky terrain.
"If I didn’t have the experience I had with David, building on difficult sites, I just don’t know if I’d have survived.
"We definitely got out of the gates before anyone else for this last boom."
Critically, he sold 16 units and 12 sections in his first 22 months to de-risk the development.
Since then he’s developed five to seven apartments a year with mainly his in-house building team and has now completed 44.
"You can run it yourself with that number and just do a really good job."
Taylor says the original units, priced as low as $595,000, have tripled in value.
Someone he sold a penthouse to for $3.75million five or six years ago recently on-sold it for $4.7m — "it’s a testament to the development".
He calls The Tiers "the classic Queenstown lock and leave".
"The people that are buying are businessmen, generally.
"They’ve built where they’re from and they want a [holiday] pad in Queenstown but they know it’s hard to build so they meet me, see what we’ve done and want to buy one."
Taylor notes every house is on rock and all service trenches also go through rock.
"Our model is concrete, steel and timber — they’re super robust.
"We have a really great relationship with council on the resource consent and building side, and they’ve let us vest all the roads which is just such a positive for future owners."
He says his next stage under way has seven units — two have already sold — with three-bedders at $2,395,000 and four-bedders at $3,295,000.
After that there’ll just be one final stage, he says, which is under design.
Taylor notes he’s planted about 30,000 natives over 10 years — "the landscaping’s really helped make it".
