As I have mainly been working on back-end systems for the last decade or so, I can’t exactly point to a website and say, “I made that”. But when I look around I can still see that projects that I have worked on still have a lasting legacy today.
Pegasus Town In The News
Pegasus town has been in the news in New Zealand recently, as the golf course that was included in the development has been purchased by a property developer that is expected to apply to re-zone the land and build housing on it.
Various members of the community are upset by the prospect of a recreational space being converted to something other than what it was promised to be.
The Website That Captured Sales Interest
My connection to Pegasus pre-dates the town even existing, as when I worked for Alchemy we took on the project to set up a website to enable members of the public to register their interest in placing an option to purchase a section or a “house and land” package. As that was in the early 2000s there wasn’t a lot of fancy graphical web-based functionality, so having a map of the basic layout of the town with colour-coded display of the status of each section, and a clickable link for registering for an option was quite an innovative approach.
I can still recall the first client meeting that I attended where we were all sat around a board room table and I pushed the case for trying our best to set up the graphical interface. The CEO was ready to fall back to presenting data in tables when we mentioned that there was a bit of complexity involved in getting the GIS data to work, but I said something like, “That’s the only cool thing about this, so we should at least try to make it work”.
Record Breaking Sale Day
As the website and associated databases did such a good job of capturing interest from prospective buyers, we were subsequently tasked with adapting it to be available on site for the big day of accepting deposits at the venue that is now known as Wolfbrook Arena – the largest in door venue in Christchurch.
According to an article that I found, the sales day resulted in a New Zealand record amount of money $122 million going toward land sales.
A Wolfbrook Coincidence
Coincidentally the Wolfbrook that has naming partner rights of the arena is the same company that has taken on ownership of the Pegasus golf course.
They didn’t have the naming rights back on the sale day, as they didn’t even exist back then.
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