A boutique built for the gap between the applicant and the big firms.

Fasttrack Partners was set up to fill a clear gap in the New Zealand consenting market. The Fast-track Approvals Act 2024 has put 149+ projects on a streamlined consenting pathway, with more being referred each month. Every applicant needs to navigate a complex multi-workstream application — and the established planning and legal firms charging partner rates are stretched.

We are not a planning firm. We are not a law firm. We are not an engineering firm. We are a boutique project management practice sitting between the applicant and the stable of specialists — planner, lawyer, ecologist, iwi liaison, traffic, archaeologist, economist — that any serious Fast-track application requires.

Big firms bill partner rates at $400–$800 an hour to project-manage these applications. Roughly half of that work is coordination, not technical advice. The wedge we are pushing into is doing the coordination properly for a flat fee at about half their cost. Their experts still get hired alongside us for the technical inputs.

We are deliberately small. The intent is to stay a high-margin boutique with a clear gap-in-the-market position, not become another full-service planning shop with partner-rate overheads.

The Fast-track regime itself has a finite peak-demand window. The Natural Environment Bill and Planning Bill land mid-2026 and reshape the consenting landscape again. The skill is transferable — running multi-workstream consenting applications is the same discipline under any regime — but the optimised version of this work has perhaps a 3–5 year window. We are built for that.