New Lease of Life for Pace Project Management’s Key CBD Project

Friday marks another milestone in the Canterbury re-build as a key building project managed by Pace Project Management starts a new lease of life. The Pace banner will come down from 764 Colombo Street, better known as Forsyth Barr Building, a privately owned City Centre commercial building formerly home to many office and retail tenants.

Pace had carried out a number of the tenants’ fit-outs across many of the high rise’s floors prior to the events of 2011; in fact Pace was managing the decorative repairs resulting from the September quake when the February 22nd quake hit. Two Pace directors, Andy Christian and Neil Walker, along with one of their project managers, we’re on the 5th floor of a nearby building when the 6.3 magnitude quake hit. It's an experience none of them will forget.

Pace managed the extraction of each of the red-zoned building’s tenants after the quake, along with commercial and private property. They also helped pioneer a new project management discipline spawned by the Canterbury quakes - the management of the insurance investigation. This involved coordinating and controlling a team of engineers, quantity surveyors and insurance professionals to discover all the damage and ultimately come to a settlement offer.

Three and a half years on from the devastating quake Pace has completed it’s work, assisting the building's owner and insurance company in reaching a settlement. On Friday at 12:30pm the Pace banner will come down. The building has recently been purchased on an as-is where-is basis by a private sector developer who intends to refurbish the building and convert it in to a new hotel, creating a valuable new asset for the Christchurch CBD.