Image: Greig Running (left) with his grandson and son Corey beside their International truck unit.
A long time stalwart of the house relocating industry and a former board member of the NZ Heavy Haulage Association (including four years as Chair), Greig Running talks to Richard Silcock about running his family business.
Asked why he’s in the house relocating industry and Greig Running of House Relocators says: “It’s because I just love it.”
At age 61, many people are considering a more relaxed lifestyle and thinking about or planning their retirement, but Greig is not ready for that yet.
“I grew up in Te Awamutu and my father was working for Warwick Johnson, owner of the House Removal Company in Tamahere. This was my introduction to house removals, and I loved every part of it. We lived at the yard and hearing those Detroit diesels screaming and Mack air starters sealed my fate as a house mover.
“When Dad left Warwick, he started his own house removal business, Atlas Building Removals in Auckland, so after leaving school at age 15 I got a job there and learnt about relocating houses. I got my heavy truck drivers’ licence and was in charge of a team of guys when I was about 18 years old. When Dad retired in 2006, it was a natural progression for me to take over the reins at Atlas and I renamed the business Greig Running House Relocators and I have not looked back since.
“It’s a family business and my son Corey has followed in my footsteps, joining the company in 2008 and he is now our Operations Manager. His wife Holly works in the office and up until recently so did my daughter Natasha who gave up work as she and her husband now have young children to look after. There are seven on the payroll and we all get along well together as a family team.
“Last year we moved our operation to Ohinewai, north of Huntly in the Waikato, where we already had a storage yard. This is a pretty central location for the area we cover and the work we do. I call it the golden triangle – the area between Hamilton, Auckland and Tauranga, but we often go beyond that and take a load south or north within the North Island.
“We run two Macks and an International, and even though it’s old gear, they still do an amazing job. We have a number of three- and four-axle hydraulic house-moving trailers, some of which we built ourselves in order to save money.”
Looking back over some of the more memorable jobs, Greig recalls the biggest was probably when they moved 115 prefabricated houses from Panmure to various Housing NZ sites all around Auckland over a period of 16 weeks.
“That was pretty exhausting and an almost 24/7 operation, with the team working in shifts. We ran two crews, each with two hydraulic trailers and would move four houses in the morning to their various locations and then load another four in the afternoon ready to be moved the following morning.
“There were in total around 400 houses moved, so in addition to us, Haines House Haulage, Daverns House Movers (now NZ Building Removals) and Andrews House Movers were also involved. It was a great time and we met some remarkable people doing the same job we were doing.
“Recently we moved a large mansion-style of a house from Silverdale to Matamata. We divided the house into five sections to comply with the VDAM rule for overdimension loads and made five separate trips between the two sites.
“We encountered terrible weather throughout the move and had to bring in fifteen truckloads of metal to form a temporary road when extracting the house from farmland in Silverdale due to the wet and sodden conditions of the ground.”
Another memorable job involved moving the Mercury Bay Boating Club’s 400 square-metre building at Buffalo Beach in Whitianga back from the sea which was encroaching on the building’s foundations at high tide and during severe storms.
“They had already lost the deck at the front of the building and there was a danger that the whole building would be undermined by the sea despite the foreshore being protected by erosion-control measures.
“The job involved jacking the building up using hydraulic house-lifting jacks, running two truck and trailer units underneath it, moving it forward in tandem and then turning it around 180 degrees before sitting it on house blocks 100 metres away, pending the purchase of land at the relocated site.”
Greig has been a member of the Heavy Haulage Association since the 1980s and spent 19 of those years on the board representing the house relocation sector.
Between 2020 and 2024 he was Chair of the Association, a job he says that took up a lot of time, especially during the Covid pandemic when he and others successfully managed to persuade government officials that in order for heavy haulage operators to operate, they needed to transit through checkpoints, despite the imposed lockdowns and ‘border’ controls in place.
“Thanks to the advice of our Association’s CEO, Jonathan Bhana-Thomson and some other board members, I learnt that jumping up and down and making lots of noise did not necessarily bring results, and that it was sometimes better to take a ‘softly softly’ approach and build working relationships with officialdom to achieve what you wanted to achieve.”
Greig says the house-moving industry as a whole is facing some tough issues going forward.
“We need to hammer out a workable solution when it comes to unnotified roadworks and how road closures can adversely affect our operations.
“I understand the need for sensible traffic management, but the carte blanche attitude of some authorities with these road closures under the banner of health and safety has to be worked through, as taking an alternative, often longer route, is not always an option particularly when there is a restriction on our compliance, permits and time.
“While some progress has been made in trying to establish a load notification website, data is not always available or being shared in a timely manner by the various parties concerned, so an equitable way forward needs to be achieved with this.
“The country’s economy has made it pretty tough over the past couple of years and particularly for those trying to buy their first house and, while purchasing a relocatable house may be a cheaper option, there remains a problem with banks and other lending institutions not providing mortgage funds for the purchase of a relocatable home, yet they will lend for a new house build! I believe they need to adjust their thinking regarding this anomaly.”
When he is not working, Greig says he likes to get out and go fishing and has several favourite spots around the Coromandel. Otherwise, he is out in his SS Commodore on the track at Hampton Downs doing fast laps and burning rubber.
Greig was very appreciative of the Heavy Haulage Association presenting him with the Outstanding Service Award at last year’s Conference in Rotorua.
“It is a nice memento and a recognition of the time I spent on the board – for which I am very thankful.
“I am also extremely grateful to those who have helped me on my chosen journey and I would like to acknowledge my father, Gordon Running, who taught me how to move a house; my Uncle Gary, who taught me some much needed business skills; my brothers Paul and Bryan and cousin Lee Running; my son Corey and his wife Holly, and my partner Kim. I also thank all those people who I have worked with over the years of which there are too many to mention here.
“I’m still pretty fit and I’ve got a few more years in me before I’ll think about retiring and probably handing over the business to Corey. I just love the industry and its people and any excuse to get behind the wheel of my Mack is, for me, just heaven!”