PROPERTY & CONSTRUCTION

As a banker, shareholder or creditor, you are aware that property insolvency or restructuring can be challenging, particularly in a difficult economy.

To ensure that you get the best possible return, you need to engage a firm with:

  • extensive insolvency skills and experience and
  • specialist property and construction knowledge.

Our Property Team's Expertise

Property Finance Experience & Debt Recovery

Construction Case Study

Our Property Team's Expertise

McDonald Vague has an experienced team that specialises in property and construction insolvencies. We are uniquely qualified to ensure our clients get the best possible results in even the toughest of situations. Our property team includes Tony Maginness, Roy Horrocks, Kevin Bromwich and Jonathan Barrett.

Our team has worked over a wide range of construction assignments including Link Construction, Woodlands Construction, Clyde Villa, Gulf Construction, Jeanna Holdings, Legacy Group, Lincoln Homes, Magellan Construction, Oxford Construction, Terra Firma, Weca Construction, Procon Structures and Oakland Construction.

Each member of the property team has a background in property or related industry, as well as the crucial strengths in insolvency, forensic accounting and investigation. We are proactive and accessible. We deal with assignments nationwide of any size and have a proven track record of excellent results.

Our property team leader, Tony Maginness, spent three years at Nationwide Finance Limited (now Allied Nationwide Finance), and four years as Lending Manager at North South Finance Limited where he successfully recovered a number of their problem loans before and during their moratorium. He also observed the first month of the Dominion Finance Limited (In receivership and liquidation) Receivership.

Tony's expertise ranged from re-negotiating body corporate charges to restructuring the management for a five star resort in Northland to arranging leases in the oversupplied North Shore office market. He also used his in-depth knowledge of property to arrange "house and build" packages on bare land and extracted increased value for North South's creditors.

Property Finance Experience & Debt Recovery

Our property team are focused on maximising creditors' returns and:

  • have particular skill in the intricacies of re-financing and re-structuring lending;
  • are very experienced at recovering debt;
  • are skilled at resolving and managing legal disputes with borrowers and guarantors;
  • implement innovative realisation strategies designed to maximise recoveries.

Extensive Property Experience & Commercial Acumen

McDonald Vague's experience throughout the property sector is wide, from:

  • residential developments to multi story apartment blocks;
  • coastal subdivisions to bare land;
  • commercial office space to large industrial space.

We have demonstrated commercial acumen and extracted increased value for creditors by:

  • re-negotiating body corporate charges
  • restructuring the management for a five star resort
  • arranging new leases
  • arranging "house and build" packages on bare land
  • negotiating with tradespeople who hadn't been paid into completing a project.

Leading Insolvency Experience

  • We have the ability to quickly take control of a situation and deploy resources as necessary.
  • Our team has the ability to manage both the operational and financial aspects of a development or completed building.
  • Identification of risks is carried out proactively and in a timely manner.
  • We have an innate understanding of the lender's needs.
  • We have a high level of knowledge, expertise and technical skill related to the property sector.
  • We understand how to work with the media to protect reputation and brand value.

Full Range of Services:

  • Pre-lending reviews
  • Due diligence reports
  • Advisory work
  • Performance monitoring
  • Strategies for workouts or asset realisation
  • Investigative accounting
  • Loan reviews
  • Business restructuring
  • The full range of insolvency appointments
  • Informal appointments

In particular the team has the expertise to recommend the appropriate solution in all cases where the enterprise is under financial stress.

Wide Network of Contacts Nationally

  • Valuers
  • Real Estate Agents
  • Quantity Surveyors
  • Construction companies
  • Builders
  • Buyers

Construction Case Study

Background

Our client, Link Construction Ltd was a major construction company who had been notified of a possible claim against them for a leaky building. The company was not covered by insurance so faced the possibility of not being able to pay their creditors.

In addition Link sub contracted to Fletcher Construction at the Auckland Hospital upgrade. Link had completed its contract but there was a major dispute about what Fletcher Construction owed Link. Due to difficulties in resolving this dispute many contractors of Link were also unpaid. Without payment from Fletcher Construction, Link was insolvent. As Link had a debtor's ledger of doubtful debts and no other assets, there appeared to be no prospect of a dividend payout to creditors.

McDonald Vague's Role

McDonald Vague was brought in to investigate Fletcher's claim and to recover any doubtful debts in the debtors' ledger. Upon investigating, it was discovered that prior to liquidation the shareholders had transferred shares to a new company. An amount of $100,000 was recovered for creditors. A GST refund of $300,000 was also recovered when we reassessed the company GST returns and a further $40,000 was recovered from provisional tax payments.

Link had a number of high profile creditors .They wanted to minimise their losses and abandon the claim against Fletcher and proposed that the GST refund be paid as a dividend to creditors. However we strongly believed that we could get a better result if we used the proceeds as a 'fighting fund' to recover monies from Fletcher, and decided that we instead follow this course of action.

This was an extremely complex construction dispute as Fletcher was refusing to pay for a number of variations as they were not properly documented. Fletcher also disputed an amount of certified work and refused to certify other completed work. We employed our own advisors and after considerable research by the advisors and McDonald Vague, we reached an agreement with Fletcher Construction to settle the claim.

Outcome

As a result of the settlement we negotiated with Fletcher Construction, McDonald Vague was able to pay all secured creditors and preferential creditors in full and the unsecured creditors were paid a dividend of 20c in the dollar.

Contact Us to Discuss Your Situation

Due to our in-depth experience of real estate and construction insolvencies and restructurings, McDonald Vague's property team can hit the ground running, swiftly assessing the situation with practised eyes, deploying resources without delay, taking control of management and finances and, most importantly, delivering fast, tailored results to the maximum benefit of all parties.