Annual Report FY25: Reinforcing our foundations
ŌCHT chairman Darren Evans and ŌCHT chief executive Cate Kearney reflect on a year further strengthening Christchurch’s solution to the affordable housing challenge.
ŌCHT is the biggest – and we say the best – community and affordable housing provider in the South Island and FY25 showed we have the capability, capacity and support to do even more.
Against a backdrop of acute housing need in our region and beyond, we ended the year with a full strategic reset to reinforce our focus into the new decade. We enter FY26 to excel at caring for households and communities, to continue leading with purpose, and ready for growth.
There is a real and pressing need for us to grow our services and our portfolio, and to build an even more robust organisation, to meet our communities’ long-term, intergenerational demand for affordable housing. We must purposefully grow to support our sector-leading delivery of genuine social impact.
We grew our owned housing stock to 580 homes in FY25 (a significant increase from just 42 in FY18) and since 2019 we have built 315 new homes as part of our ongoing, scalable development pipeline that will provide housing stability for countless households in need.
We also introduced and embedded a new Affordable Rental stream, recognising too many households are struggling to find and retain a home they can afford in the private market. Our tenure products now span the early stages of the housing continuum, from community housing to progressive home ownership (PHO).
As our first PHO households settled into new homes at Carey Street, contractors began work on our second largest development of 65 new homes at Three Lanes Lyttelton Street.
Our key strategic partner the Christchurch City Council this year voted to support the Trust responding to calls to provide community and affordable housing solutions in neighbouring regions elsewhere in the South Island. FY25 saw ŌCHT work to expand its geographical boundaries to work outside of Christchurch. The Ōtautahi Community Housing Trust (Trust Variation) Bill will go through Parliament in FY26 to facilitate this expansion.
We have prioritised being resource ready to enable this growth. We further enhanced our internal structure and supports, reinforced our finance relationships, and most critically, demonstrated the worth of our strategic partnerships. These relationships, including our enduring partnership with Christchurch City Council (to whom we’ve returned $166 million in rent), are the bedrock of our purposeful growth.
The true measure of our success is not in balance sheets, though our financials strongly underpin our capacity to grow to meet community need, but in the stability and quality of life we provide our tenants. Our goal is to be an amazing and responsive landlord and address the social stigma often associated with public housing through superior services and high-quality homes.
We achieved an exceptional 98.4% occupancy rate and sustained 99.4% of all community housing tenancies this year, reflecting our focus on supporting tenants to live well, on providing opportunities for personal growth, and on improving homes to meet modern needs. We reinforced our position as the single biggest provider of homes to the Housing First Ōtautahi collaboration, supporting 76 people from acute homelessness into stable accommodation.
Our strategic asset management approach and skilled in-house facilities team executed 242 upgrades (up from 215 last year) and completed 7085 minor maintenance jobs in FY25. We want our homes and our services to offer dignity and comfort. Our new Tenant Interest Groups help us drive improvement and inform how we deliver real, long-term social impact.
Financially, ŌCHT continues to prudently build a charitable enterprise that is set up for the future, now. The Trust received $38.4 million in revenue this year, allowing us to contribute an additional $4 million surplus rent payment. This was achieved while supporting tenants that transferred to us from Council in 2016, in our subsidised Assisted Rental stream. Since 2017, that subsidy has delivered more than $61 million relief to tenants.
FY25 was a year in which we mapped ŌCHT’s future delivering on our intergenerational commitment to people in acute housing need. With our team, Trustees, tenants, and partners, ŌCHT enters FY26 uniquely positioned to build stronger communities wherever they are needed.
