News and views

Getting offices purpose-built for your needs would get anyone excited. For the last 12 months we’ve been advising of our needs, checking off the blueprint, and slowly seeing progress every time we drove past the site; we were there from the start. So when the date arrived that we could finally make the move, it was hard to contain ourselves.

We advisors, who specialise in trusts, had felt for some time the days of assets being cleanly ring-fenced and largely taken out of the equation for rest home subsidy assessments were closing.

Where there is a (last) Will (and testament), there is a way. Without this most crucial of documents, unfortunately, not only is there a no absolutely clear way for settling an Estate, things can get downright wayward.

A residential property was being auctioned in Auckland. The auction stalled at a price of $2.5 million. The vendors had set a reserve of $2.7 million. The auctioneer halted the auction while he asked the vendors whether they would be prepared to reduce the reserve price. The vendors agreed to reduce the reserve price to $2.6 million.

The Court of Appeal recently had to decide the meaning of a condition in a sale and purchase agreement which made the purchase of a property “subject to and conditional upon … approval of directors”. This is the first time that a “subject to director’s approval” clause has been considered by a New Zealand court.

The Court of Appeal in the case of Westland District Council v TC York and Alpine Glacier Motel Limited, has confirmed that a Council will be liable for any damages suffered by a purchaser as a result...

A recent High Court case shows that, in some circumstances, buyers of a property cannot rely totally on a code compliance certificate, but may have to undertake further investigations themselves. This will have implications for agents in circumstances where buyers ask them whether the purchase should be conditional on a builders report.