249 commercial properties are for lease in central New Plymouth. What does this have in common with a recent 20%+ drop off in retail sales in Rotorua in just one week ?
249 commercial properties are for lease in central New Plymouth. A lot of comments are being made about how online shopping is causing the drop off in business. The problem is it isn’t online shopping – it is parking restrictions – which is causing a lot of this downturn.
What’s going on with our city centre carparking in New Plymouth has just started in Rotorua. Why don’t these councils talk to each other and learn from other Councils major mistakes ?
Businesses in Rotorua started dropping 20% to 35% in sales in the first week of a new parking system going in. One business owner moved out of the parking zone after 2 weeks and her turnover mostly came back. This has nothing to do with people turning to online shopping – it is because a bunch of people running a Council have no idea about shopper behaviour.
Exactly this situation happened to businesses in our city centre when carparking progressively got more expensive. $3 an hour was the last straw – and why we now have so many empty shops.
Travelling around NZ, the smaller towns with all free parking are humming. Katikati, Raglan, Taupo – all have at least one hour of free parking. Retail and hospo is thriving and the streets are busy.
We put this story on our Facebook page – and followers told us about other towns they visit recently who all have free parking and their towns and cities are busy. Mentions were Hamilton with 2 hours free parking, Hawera and Morrinsville.
For the sake of the businesses in Rotorua, we hope the council in Rotorua ask the NPDC a few questions and quickly reverse all these “retail killing” parking decisions.
Once the city centre has been stalled, it is very difficult to get it humming again as the newly elected NPDC officials are finding out. This is the link to the Rotorua parking story:
We’ve attached a map showing 120 of the 249 commercial premises for lease in New Plymouth.
Posted: 4 Oct 2026