One team. One standard.

Gareth Newton is Chief Executive of HPA Group. His part in a village starts well before there is a village. Once a site has been identified and the owner found, he goes and walks it, meets whoever holds the title, and listens to what they know about the place. Land that has been in one family for a long time carries things a feasibility study will not turn up, and some of it ends up in the village.

Before any of that, there are fundamentals that have to be there: demand in the area, soils that engineer properly, and not too much slope, because slope becomes an accessibility problem for the people who will live on it. If those boxes are not ticked, HPA does not pursue the site. The feasibility study behind that decision is produced in-house.

He came into the sector through electrical engineering, and he came into it on site rather than from an office, spending his early years in daily conversation with residents about what made a place feel safe to them. He reads that as the origin of how the business is run now. On an HPA site the people building and the people documenting are not two separate operations, and keeping it that way is a daily job rather than a policy.

The direction he sets for the company is succession. Nearly thirty years of history, and the intention to keep it intact for the next thirty, in villages none of the current directors will see finished.

Hamish Ward spent his teens and early twenties in the New Zealand Army and left after the Christchurch earthquakes to rebuild his home city. He started as a labourer on an earthquake repair at the University of Canterbury, signed up to an apprenticeship the same day, and spent the years from twenty-two to twenty-six either building, learning to build, or at Polytech in the evenings studying construction management and quantity surveying. He won the New Zealand Apprentice of the Year competition along the way.

Ten years followed at a commercial construction company, moving through every role in it, from apprentice to site manager, with months at a time spent inside estimating, quantity surveying, health and safety and accounts. The systems the construction arm of HPA now runs to nationwide are the ones he built.

He plans every construction operation, sets the hold points the site stops at, and owns the quality system behind the build programme. Every hour that goes into a development is recorded. When a process is not working, unpicking it is his job, on the argument that an inefficient site is the thing that most annoys the people working on it, and that doing it properly is what makes a quoted price hold. He still spends an hour or two most weeks going back through a set of plans looking for a better way to do it.

Lee Eagle has been with HPA Group for twenty-three years. It started in Gisborne, at Beetham Village, HPA's oldest development, with bare land being turned into a working village. Before that he was an electromechanical cadet with the Royal New Zealand Navy, then in research and development, then into the retirement sector from an electrical engineering side, designing and building the embedded networks that carried television, fibre, communications and power distribution through a village. At the time that was a novel idea.

He is also the person who can say what HPA used to be. In the beginning it supplied construction crews and nothing else: the people who built the villas, the hospitals and, sometimes, the shared buildings that went with them. Feasibility studies, architectural design and review, planning and council submissions were added over the years that followed, and rolled into a single offer. The full-service model is something HPA assembled, not something it started with.

His argument for HPA keeping a stake in a village afterwards is that it is the only way the knowledge goes back in. Twenty-three years of learning what works is worth nothing if the company leaves once the last villa is signed off. He puts the test for whether a village was done well plainly, and it does not involve a brochure.