A decision made more than 30 years ago to retain the Bay of Plenty’s stake in Port of Tauranga helped create an intergenerational fund now worth around $3.5 billion. Quayside is charged with protecting and growing that regional asset, while ensuring its benefits continue to flow to the Bay today and for generations to come.

We asked Quayside CEO Lyndon Settle about the value of thinking long term, the impact of the fund today and what it could mean for future generations.

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Why does your organisation exist, and what long-term role does it play in the future of the Western Bay? 

Quayside exists to protect and grow the Bay of Plenty’s intergenerational investment fund for the benefit of current and future generations. 

The fund is a regional asset, with each Bay of Plenty community member as the beneficiary. It gives the Bay a degree of financial security and ensures that a significant pool of capital remains anchored here, working for the people who live here. Our responsibility is to preserve its real value, grow it over time and provide our shareholder (Bay of Plenty Regional Council) with a sustainable annual distribution without compromising the fund’s future. 

Today, the fund has net assets of approximately $3.5 billion. Its annual distribution provides around 25% of the Regional Council’s revenue, helping fund Council activities and reduce the rates burden on Bay of Plenty households.  

Tell us about a couple of projects, investments or initiatives that best demonstrate the impact your organisation can have on the region. 

The best example is our long-term ownership of Port of Tauranga. More than 30 years ago, the Bay of Plenty made a conscious decision to retain ownership of its shareholding in the Port rather than sell it. At the time, that stake was worth around $44 million. Today, Port of Tauranga has a market value of more than $5 billion and Quayside’s shareholding is worth approximately $3.3 billion.  

That decision seeded one of New Zealand’s largest regionally owned investment funds. It’s easy to look at those numbers as investment success, but the real impact is what they enable:

• In 2026, Quayside distributed $54.2 million to Bay of Plenty Regional Council. The dividend to Council helps fund its work across the region and reduce the rates burden on local households. In 2025/26, it equated to around $405 per rateable property and reduced average general rates by approximately 34%.  

• Quayside also continues to service the Perpetual Preference Share (PPS) scheme established in 2007, which provided $200 million for Council to invest in regional projects, including the University of Waikato campus in Tauranga, the Ōpōtiki Harbour development and Rotorua Museum. Dividends paid to PPS unit holders totalled $9 million in 2026, bringing Quayside’s total distributions for the year to $63.2 million.

In many ways, this is the story of a region backing itself. Previous generations chose to retain a strategic asset rather than take a short-term return. The Bay of Plenty is still benefiting from that decision today, as will future generations if we sustainably grow the fund’s capital and resultant dividend cash flow. 

A second example is Rangiuru Business Park, a 148-hectare industrial business park in the Western Bay of Plenty. It’s creating space for businesses to grow, relocate and gain efficiencies from its Port and workforce access. As lead developer, Quayside has delivered over $180 million in infrastructure within the business park, which has provided jobs for local people throughout a tough economic period, while also ensuring readiness for developers and future owners through minimising development downtime. We are also proud of the environmental outcomes achieved to date, with biodiversity thriving and native birds returning to the dual-purpose 48ha stormwater pond and wetland. 

Also locally, Panorama Towers is a 13-storey mixed-use development in Tauranga CBD, shows how Quayside can invest in opportunities that deliver both long-term value and regional impact. The multi-level car park and purpose-built medical facility will bring together healthcare and specialist medical services, helping improve access to care for a growing and ageing population. Where we can generate strong commercial returns while contributing to outcomes that matter for the Bay of Plenty, we will seek to do both. 

Intergenerational capital is an important theme in this story. What does thinking in decades rather than years allow your organisation to do differently? 

It changes the question we’re trying to answer. We’re not asking how much value the fund can deliver today. We’re asking whether the next generation will inherit the same, or greater, opportunities than we did. 

One of our values is Kaitiakitanga – Purposeful Stewardship, meaning our actions today deliver a better tomorrow. That’s why we focus on preserving and growing the fund’s real value over time. Not just growing the dollar figure but maintaining its purchasing power and its ability to keep delivering benefits to the Bay. 

Looking ahead 20 years, what would success look like for the Western Bay, and what role do you hope your organisation will have played in achieving it? 

Success would be a thriving region, measured through a productive and diverse economy, future-focused infrastructure, plentiful jobs and the capacity to make choices in its own long-term interests. 

For Quayside, success would mean the intergenerational future fund remains independent of political influence, grows in real terms and is less reliant on any single asset. It would continue providing sustainable distributions to our shareholder, while retaining enough capital to support future generations within the Bay of Plenty. 

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Read the original story in this series:

The Bay’s hidden balance sheet: investing in our region for generations