Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne is a 225-hectare fenced ecosanctuary in Karori, ten minutes from the Wellington CBD, operated by the Karori Sanctuary Trust on land owned by Wellington City Council. It is worth a profile this week for an unfashionable reason: it files audited accounts, and they show a visitor business that got smaller and richer at the same time.
It started as a decommissioned reservoir nobody had a use for
Two dams in the Karori valley supplied Wellington’s water from 1874. The upper was decommissioned around 1991 and the lower in 1997, which left the city with a large, steep, self-contained catchment and no purpose for it. Jim Lynch pushed the idea of a fenced wildlife sanctuary through the early 1990s, the councils studied it, and after public consultation in 1994 it was approved. The Karori Wildlife Sanctuary Trust was formed in the middle of 1995.
The thing that made it work did not exist yet. In 1993 a group of conservation managers, scientists and engineers looked at every fence design available and found none of them adequate. A new prototype was designed in 1994 and tested against nearly 200 animals including rats, mice, cats, stoats, possums, weasels and ferrets. The finished fence runs 8.6 kilometres around the perimeter and is built to exclude 14 species of introduced land mammal, from deer down to mice. It was completed in late 1999, and everything inside was cleared over the following nine months.
Then the reintroductions started, and they are the product: 20 kiwi pukupuku in 2000, kākā in 2002, 70 tuatara from Stephens Island in 2005, Hamilton’s frog in 2006, 100 wētāpunga in 2007, rifleman in 2019. The land passed from the regional council to Wellington City Council in 2004. The visitor centre, designed by Jasmax, opened in 2010 at a cost of $17 million, and whether the council should have backed it was contested at the time.
The accounts: $8.8 million, and only 18 percent of it from the council
For the year to 30 June 2025, audited by PwC on behalf of the Auditor-General, total revenue was $8,799,980, against $8,256,548 the year before. The mix:
| Revenue line | 2024/25 | 2023/24 |
|---|---|---|
| Admissions | $2,935,619 | $2,795,730 |
| Sale of goods (café, retail, functions, education) | $2,255,202 | $2,119,148 |
| Wellington City Council grant | $1,585,994 | $1,481,873 |
| Other grants and donations | $1,034,195 | $820,566 |
| Membership subscriptions | $503,003 | $509,734 |
| Other | $255,707 | $251,507 |
| Finance income | $230,260 | $276,190 |
| COVID-19 support payments | nil | $1,800 |
| Total | $8,799,980 | $8,256,548 |
The council grant is $1,585,994 of $8,799,980, or 18.0 percent. The trust reports the inverse as a performance measure and puts non-council-grant revenue at 82 percent of the total, against a target of more than 75 percent. For a council-controlled organisation sitting on council land, earning four dollars in five is the headline governance fact about the place.
Visitation was 136,038, against 149,369 the year before, a fall of 13,331 or 8.9 percent. It still beat the target of 130,000, which tells you the trust had already planned for a smaller year.
Now divide. Total revenue of $8,799,980 across 136,038 visits is $64.69 a visit. The prior year, $8,256,548 across 149,369 visits was $55.28. That is $9.41 more per visit, up 17.0 percent, on 8.9 percent fewer people through the gate. The trust publishes its own narrower version of this measure, excluding council and government grants, and has it rising from $37.07 to $42.70 against a target of $37.52.
The number
+17.0%
Revenue per visit at Zealandia in 2024/25, on 8.9 percent fewer visits. Total revenue of $8,799,980 across 136,038 visits, against $8,256,548 across 149,369 the year before. (Karori Sanctuary Trust annual report 2024/25, calculation ours)
What is worth copying
Non-ticket revenue is nearly as big as ticket revenue. Admissions brought $2,935,619. Café, retail, functions and education brought $2,255,202, which is 77 cents for every dollar of admissions. Most attraction operators treat the café as an amenity that stops people leaving. Here it is close to a second business, and it is the line that lets a fall in visitors coexist with a rise in revenue.
Memberships are an annuity that barely moves. Subscriptions were $503,003, down 1.3 percent in a year when visits fell 8.9 percent. Members are the part of the audience that pays whether or not they turn up, and they barely flinched while gate numbers dropped by more than 13,000. The trust also soft-launched a corporate membership product during the year, which is the obvious next move and a long way from where most operators are.
It sold the capital-heavy asset and kept the operation. In 2017 the trust sold the visitor centre and associated assets to Wellington City Council and signed an agreement to lease it back. A charitable trust running a conservation programme has no business carrying a $17 million building on its balance sheet, and it no longer does. It pays $48,000 a year in finance expense and gets on with the part it is actually good at.
Language, done properly rather than performatively. The trust delivered its first Mandarin-language tour during the year, with Spanish and German handouts following, using its own staff. That is a small, low-cost, unglamorous move at an attraction whose entire pitch is a story that has to be told rather than looked at.
Where the model runs out of road
The fence is nearly written off, and its replacement is not funded. This is the whole thing. The predator-exclusion fence cost $2,457,633 and has a net book value of $257,592, which means 89.5 percent of it is depreciated. It is depreciated over 25 to 50 years and it went up in 1999, so the arithmetic is not a surprise. The trust has started the replacement project with the engineering firm GHD and backing from the estate of John Nankervis, and its own annual report says plainly that it is a large, long-term project “that we will not be able to complete without the support of our community”. There is no published budget and no published timetable. Every bird, every ticket, every membership and the entire 500-year vision sits behind 8.6 kilometres of ageing wire, and the plan to renew it is currently a fundraising campaign.
Costs are outrunning revenue. Revenue rose 6.6 percent. Other operating expenditure rose 13.9 percent, from $6,217,640 to $7,082,189. Surplus before depreciation fell from $921,285 to $561,364, down 39.1 percent, and operating surplus after depreciation fell from $636,254 to $199,633. The yield gain was real and it still was not enough to hold the bottom line. Cash also fell, from $2,775,141 to $1,720,192, partly offset by term deposits rising to $2,571,612.
Its greatest success competes with its ticket. Zealandia’s reason for existing is that native birds spread beyond the fence, and they have. Kākā and tūī are now ordinary in Wellington suburbs, which the trust rightly counts as its central achievement. It is also a commercial problem nobody at the trust can solve, because a Wellingtonian who sees kākā from the kitchen window has one fewer reason to pay to walk into a valley to look at them. The halo undercuts the gate. This is the rare case where an operator’s mission and its revenue model point in opposite directions, and the answer has to be that the visit delivers something the suburb cannot: night tours, guided interpretation, kiwi, tuatara, and the parts of the story you only get inside.
And the landlord is the funder. The council owns the land, owns the visitor centre, is the lessor, provides 18.0 percent of revenue and appoints trustees, with a sitting councillor on the board. That has clearly worked. It also means one council’s budget round is a single point of failure, and a fence replacement is exactly the sort of capital ask that arrives in a bad year.
What to take from it
If you run an attraction, the transferable part is not the fence. It is that Zealandia went into a year expecting fewer visitors, planned for 130,000, got 136,038, and still grew revenue 6.6 percent because it had built three things that do not depend on gate numbers: a retail and hospitality operation worth 77 cents in every admissions dollar, a membership base that paid through the dip, and a donor programme that lifted 26 percent to $1,034,195. That is what yield looks like when it is structural rather than a price rise.
The warning is on the other page. A business whose entire proposition depends on one physical asset needs the replacement of that asset to be a funded plan, not a campaign, and it needs it well before the asset is 89.5 percent depreciated. Depreciation is not an accounting formality. It is a countdown, and this one has been running since 1999.
Written from public sources: the Karori Sanctuary Trust’s audited annual report for the year ended 30 June 2025, its statements of intent, Wellington City Council’s council-controlled organisation pages, and published histories of the sanctuary. Written without the operator’s involvement. The Shoulder Season has no commercial relationship with any business it covers, takes no payment for coverage, and gives no subject approval over what is published.
Operator profiles run every week or two, a different business each time. Written from public sources, with no involvement from the operator and no commercial relationship of any kind.