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Maureen Travers, founder and owner Omaha Beach Holiday rentals, with housekeepers Tarin, Sharon and Julia.
High summer with the family at the bach – what could be more Kiwi or relaxing?
But the days when the beach house or country cottage was little more than a glorified shack filled with old, mismatched secondhand furnishings have long gone, in this area at least.
Holiday homes are a huge local industry, with hundreds of properties available, from cabins to mansions, existing solely to provide a bed for the night for tourists and visitors whose expectations are growing all the time.
Of course, anyone living between the Johnstone’s Hill tunnels and Whangarei will be more than aware of the massive influx our region experiences every summer; the weekend and holiday traffic queues in all directions tell us that. Not to mention the suddenly crowded beaches, an inability to find a park in town, and negotiating drifts of lost souls who can’t seem to find the right way through the local supermarket, let alone Warkworth’s infernal Hill Street junction.
But while we all might sense that things are getting busier and the numbers of visitors seems to be growing, few residents probably realise the sheer size and extent of the holiday home market. Take a look at some of the key holiday accommodation websites, such as Bookabach, Bachcare or Trade Me’s Holiday Houses, and they reveal that there are anything from 500 to 1000-plus properties offering self-contained accommodation of some sort, whether it’s a sleepout for two or a modern glass and concrete monolith for 10 or more.
The biggest growth – and number of homes available – has been happening in two key areas: Mangawhai and Omaha-Matakana. And Omaha has the largest number of homes that are solely holiday lets.
In the 2013 Census, Omaha had 1164 dwellings – 276 occupied and 888 unoccupied – which probably accounts for why the place resembles a ghost town if you visit midweek during winter. And, although the number of permanent residents is rising, the number of new builds means that those proportions haven’t altered much in the meantime.
There are three key types of rental – those that are bought and run purely as a letting business; those that are bought as a holiday home then used partly by the owner and rented out at other times; and casual lets, where locals move out and let their own home for a few weeks to make some money during peak periods.
And there is money to be made – while you can still find the odd little place for $75 or $80 a night, the majority are at least $200-$300, and you can pay up to $2000-plus – per night – for a top-of-the-range property, and Omaha rents are higher than most.
Maureen Travers has been running Omaha Beach Holiday Rentals for 15 years and in that time has witnessed huge changes in the region. She started managing properties when a friend who had a bach in Omaha suddenly had to move to Australia. The house sat empty for much of the year and needed maintenance.
“It was costing them too much. So I said there might be a few people who’d pay a few dollars to rent it. That was how innocent it was then, and that’s how it all started,” Maureen says.
Word spread, and the business gradually built up via newspaper advertisements, but it was the internet that really caused business to boom. Maureen now has well over 30 homes that are permanently rented, and that figure increases to 40-plus over the peak Christmas and New Year period.
“The most I’ve had was 53, which was crazy. I have a lot of staff, but I didn’t get across the causeway for three-and-a-half weeks then.”
Holiday homes might bring in a lot of money, but they also create a lot of work and a lot of mess, but this in turn provides significant employment. While some owners do the hard graft of cleaning up after guests themselves, most employ armies of housekeepers, cleaners, gardeners and handymen.
Real estate agents Angela Wain and Andrew Steens own a converted chapel in Point Wells that has been split into two apartments.
“I employ local people to look after it. There’s a whole bunch of women who do cleaning and servicing in the Omaha area; it’s creating jobs,” Angela says. “We use linen services in Warkworth, because we have such fast turnarounds. Trying to keep it white … I would never want to wash all that linen.”
Maureen Travers’ business also uses Warkworth Laundry for linen, taking huge loads in every other day during the summer peak, while Omaha Holiday Houses, a more recent entrant to the holiday letting business, now hires its linen from Linen 2 Go, a new premium linen hire business that recently expanded from Waiheke into Rodney.
Of course, renting out your property to strangers presents something of a risk, especially to those new to the game. One local woman recalls the horror of finding apparent evidence of drug use on her best cutlery and a prized Spanish paella bowl broken in two after a casual let. The bowl had been placed on a high shelf as if it was still complete, so when she took it down some weeks later and it fell apart in her hands, the culprits were long gone.
However, the holiday letting companies have systems in place, and they charge accordingly.
“What my housekeepers are going to find, who knows,” Maureen says. “You never know till you open the door. With some, you start picking up things at the front gate and just keep going … nothing fazes us.”
The key to hassle-free renting is in the vetting. Most agents prefer and encourage family groups and repeat bookings, which make up the bulk of local summer bookings, closely followed by weddings. Most properties rent throughout the year, especially at weekends (though large groups of self-professed “young professionals” wanting to come up from Auckland might not always be encouraged).
Working out the type of renter you are dealing with before you take a booking is vital, according to Maureen.
“You have to read into what you’re hearing and seeing. You’re dealing with total strangers, and they have to be the right people. You’re going to be giving them the keys to multi-million dollar homes and the owners are trusting you. I pride myself that that’s the biggest part of my job – who arrives on that doorstop, because once they’re there, bags in hand, it’s very difficult to say you can’t come in.”
These days, whoever arrives on the doorstep is likely to be more fussy than they were a decade ago. Rich Carey, marketing manager of Bachcare Holiday Homes, says the biggest change he’s seen is people’s increasing expectations.
“Guests have come to expect instant and immediate service, both when making their booking and when they are in residence,” he says. “They are expecting more hotel-like services at the bach.”
Nicola Hooper, who runs Omaha Holiday Houses with husband Peter, and Paul and Stephanie Walker, agrees, but says it’s only to be expected when high rents are charged.
“That’s kind of understandable, especially for Omaha. People pay good bucks to come here for holidays,” she says. “For example, most people expect wifi. We have to say this is the owner’s holiday home, they’re not going to pay for year-round wifi if they’re only here for two weeks a year.”
Being on call 24 hours a day to several hundred, sometimes demanding, holidaymakers who often don’t understand the quirks and foibles of what is essentially rural life might not be everyone’s cup of tea. And it might take way more work than it used to get a home to today’s letting standard. But there is no doubt that holiday homes are now a huge business in the Mahurangi area and play an increasingly significant role in the local economy.
