Let's talk about rent baby

Lets talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be.  Let’s talk about rent.  (With apologies to Salt-n-Pepa).  

I was having a look at One Foundation and tripped over myself from my last blog. So rather than lose the details in a paragraph, I was thinking it was worth a deeper dive.  When I look at the BlueSky et al arrangement I look at the top 50 entities getting funding from these groups.  Sneaking in of late is Auckland Community Education Centre (ACEC).

Quick reminder: after a decade of looking at this stuff I have a couple of red flags around grantseekers including: small number of trustees, multiple grants from few entities and recently registered charities getting significant grants.

This entity was registered with the Charities Register on 9 June 2023.  They have a website: (link not working as at publication date) and a Facebook page which does show activity but has 7 followers.

There are two trustees who have been trustees since inception. They operate out of 18 Byron Ave in Takapuna.

From Charities Services their charitable purpose is “We establish this Trust for the charitable purpose of providing community education programs to local communities including, without limitation: the educational courses & services to new Asian immigrants;

the health courses and information to the local communities; the educational courses to children and youth; etc.”  So it’s a pretty wide brief.  

What I have done below is to pull together headline items from their published annual accounts for financial year 31 March 2026.  

What I can surmise from this: based on the accounts everything is free to participants.  That’s great, especially if you are low income.  But what is jaw dropping is the rent component: for the past three years its been between $238k and $284k.  For an entity that in most communities would be operating out of a church hall or other such community space. And for a charity with, based on salaries of just over $100k, must only have a couple of staff.

I asked my dad to look at the purchase history of 18 Byron Ave.  What that showed was that at the end of May 2021 an entity called Flying Dragon purchased that place for $4.8m.  And who owns Flying Dragon?  Its 50 / 50 Jackson Rao and Jianmin Hu.  

Jackson Rao is of course the Principal at Dawn Management who manages the BlueSky et al pokies.  Jianmin Hu is a former director of another tenant at 18 Byron Ave: Aotearoa Art Academy (a limited liability company without a workable website I could find). This is super interesting to me: why does One Foundation give them so much?  I wanted to understand more about these decisions so cut DIA’s Granted dataset (presented very simply in a pivot table).  It shows the amounts asked for by the entity from various grant makers, the number of times funds were requested, and the results of that ask. This shows me that they have been successful in 58 of 64 funding applications.  For those grant seekers out there, thoughts? 

The second issue is of course the amount of rent charged.  Now I am not a Commercial real estate expert so asked good old AI who informed me that its got an implied yield of 5.6%.  So ok: that seems reasonable.  However that assumes ACEC are picking up the full tab for the tenancy.  There does seem to be an Arts entity working out of this space too: sadly the Google Street View isn’t grand and my budget doesn’t stretch to a drive by. That could well be Aotearoa Arts Academy, a company, so we can’t query accounts. It could be they sublet some space (see the rental income as above - in 2026 this rental income was a whole 3% of total rent paid).  Looking at ACEC’s account, note 7 records no commitments to lease or rent assets, despite annual rent expenditure of $268,778. 

So I suppose we won’t talk about rent.  But all the good things that may be: The mahi that this group does: yep great.  The diaspora needs cultural touch points and those cultural elements makes NZ a far more interesting place.

Far more interesting is all the "other" things that may be. 

Firstly: costs.  Delivery of the service seems to be very high cost.  We don’t have a break down of costs by programme, but we can look at 2026 numbers and assume half the costs go on community classes, then each class costs $2,927 per class to deliver.  Each holiday programme costs $69k to deliver.  And there is no financial contribution by participants (old school here: I like a bit of user pays just to ensure some commitment from participants).  So to be fair I can't benchmark without a better understanding of where the costs lie, who to benchmark against, but gut feel is this seems high.

Secondly decision making.  Having 58 out of 64 grant applications approved seems very high.  It is unknown how those money decisions are made, although I do note that a venue, Milestone Bar, was with Dragon (one of the Rao managed pokies) until sometime in 2021.  It moved to North and South and then One Foundation in 2023, the year that One Foundation started to fund ACEC. Of course ACEC only started in 2023 so that makes sense.  HOWEVER the former tenant of Byron Ave (more on that below) was the recipient of a lot of support from the Rao managed pokies (but not North and South) before ACEC started.  I’m not saying anything is up: rather it just prompts a few questions.  

Thirdly, overlapping business and governance.  As I look at these many charities, many of the same names keep coming up.  For example, a trustee of ACEC is Linqing Wang.  He is now a director on New Zealand Culture & Media Group (NZCMG), and a 39% shareholder.  This is an entity established by Jackson Rao some years ago and is the 7^th most funded charity by pokies in NZ for 2025, receiving all of its grants from BlueSky, Milestone and Rano.  Curiously enough One Foundation were asked to fund NZCMG in 2023 and 2024 and clearly said no.  And again, from the 310 grant applications made in the five years of Granted’s data, the applications from NZCMG to One Foundation were the only applications denied.  Again: heck of a success rate, but a rabbit hole we won’t go down at the moment.

There is a charity (New Zealand MultiCulture and Arts Exchange Centre - formerly known as New Zealand Chinese Culture and Arts Exchange Centre) who was at Byron Ave paying similar amount of rent. And incidentally the charity has two trustees, one of whom is the current owner of Aotearoa Arts Academy. So yeah: worth a look there too.  

And I’ll look in more detail at One Foundation next time.  We have a few more burrows to go down.

I’ve learned a bit from this wee dive.  The rent? Well I think it’s a lot, but it turns out its ok in terms of quantum if the full building is being rented by this single entity. What is interesting here is the cost of delivering each programme, the high success rates of grant applications to a relatively small number of gaming trusts, and the overlapping business and governance relationships across some of the organisations involved.

I write about this stuff as I believe that we need to understand where funding comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there.  The pokie industry steward over $340m in community grants each year and have their social license to operate based on our trust that grants will do good. In the greater scheme of things its rounding, but for many organisations surviving and doing great mahi it’s a lot of money.  I do think that as a society we need some greater oversight in where those funds are headed.  Love to talk with you if you think this is at all interesting, and if you want to dive into the data a bit more than happy to do so. Check out my website http://www.delfi.co.nz/