Are you hiring David Driver? Or his companies Discovery Contracting Ltd (Clitheroe, UK), NZLANDSCAPES LIMITED, HERITAGE MASONRY LIMITED, NZLANDSCAPE AND BUILDING LIMITED, PINK CLOUD LIMITED or as of the 16th of May 2025 ‘VERYDISCO LIMITED’? You might like to read this article from the front page of the Press newspaper or the Licensed Building Practitioners Complaint Decision.

Here is my factual account of my experience hiring David Driver, ‘builder’.

June 2022: As I was scrolling a community page, I came across some great looking portfolio photos. They were posted by a local builder: David Driver.

The photos were of decks that had been done in the area, and they looked well designed and solidly constructed. As I had recently moved into a place with a backyard, and had enough saved to pay to get some work done, I enquired about the possibility. 

I met Dave at 2:30pm on the 28th of June, and my first impression was of a good bloke. Originally from Clitheroe in the U.K., Dave had been living in Christchurch, New Zealand for some time and was a qualified builder, and LBP (Licensed Building Practitioner).
Dave said he’d done lots of work in the area, and had in fact built the retaining wall on the boundary of my place. This turned out to be the first of many deceptions: he had not, in fact, built this wall.

As we spent some time talking about the space, and what I’d like to get done, he was receptive and professional. Four hours later, he emailed through a quote which included a great drawing.

I sat with the quote of $24,045+GST for a while, weighing up if I could afford it or if it would better to hold off. That’s not the kind of money I spend lightly, it certainly wasn’t a cheap quote. But having only recently moved in, and with warmer months approaching, I wanted to create a space to enjoy with family and friends for years to come. I checked he was an LBP, and made the decision to go ahead with the work. It’s important to state at this point, I’m not much of a handyman. I work in IT and for this kind of work I would rather pay someone to do a professional job rather than try myself. I thought it would save a lot of trouble to get someone to do it properly – I mistakenly thought Dave was that safe pair of hands.

So at the beginning of July, I gave Dave the green light. He was keen to start the work straight away.

I was travelling for work quite a bit over the next month and so I let Dave get on with it. He provided regularly updates by sending photos and everything looked great. At this point I had no reason not to trust Dave or the quality of his work and so when he requested the final payment, I didn’t hesitate to pay him.

When I arrived home after those weeks away I was anticipating sun on the deck, beers and barbecues with good friends. But I quickly discovered a few imperfections. I emailed these through to Dave and gave him a month to fix it up while I was heading back overseas for work. You can see these initial visual issues below (structural issues are to come):

​

Upon arrival back to New Zealand, I was looking forward to seeing these faults corrected and, finally, enjoying the fruits of Dave’s labour – and my expense. Unfortunately Dave had spent only around 20 minutes fixing the cracked wood in the first photo and he decided that was sufficient. I was really disappointed as the job was clearly unfinished, and I started to suspect Dave was not the builder, nor the person, he had made himself out to be. I needed another professional opinion and decided to get a report done by New Zealand Building Inspections on the quality of his work.

This is when I learnt that Dave decided to take shortcuts below the deck as well as above it – and the flaws in his work weren’t just skin deep, but structural as well.

The inspector said in the 20 years he’s been doing inspections, Dave’s work was “the worst he’d ever seen”. He recommended that the deck be entirely demolished and rebuilt. My heart sank. I pondered this for the next few days, feeling ashamed that I had trusted Dave and even paid him based off this trust.

Of course, I’ve heard the horror stories of cowboy builders but every builder I’ve met before has done a great job. Unfortunately I had put Dave in this group and he took advantage of my trust. At this point I looked at the options available to me and came across the Disputes Tribunal. While I had no experience with the Disputes Tribunal, its aim is to protect you from bad workmanship and it appeared to be exactly what I needed.

I applied, paid the fee, and had the tribunal date set for the 17th of January. The call lasted around three hours and consisted of Dave, the judge, myself, and the building inspector. I’ve never been through this process before but I was impressed with how it was run. The judge had some building knowledge and was able to ask the right questions of each party. At the end of the call, I felt confident he would get to the bottom of it and all was left to do was wait for the decision.

The letter arrived in the post a week later, with the clear decision: “NZLandscape and Building Ltd to pay $24,533.80“. The judge had determined I should be reimbursed in full. I thought that would be the end of it, but Dave had one last trick up his sleeve.

This wasn’t Dave Driver’s first rodeo.

‘NZLandscape and Building Limited’ at this point was on the companies register and that’s who the debt was with. As time went on, I saw that Dave hadn’t filed the companies register and was in the process of being struck off.

What I learnt, was that Dave seemed to have started then struck off a number of companies in his name.
Did other people fall into this same cycle? I’m not sure but the Court has just accepted by application to enforce the court debt, which would mean if Dave doesn’t pay it he won’t be able to start another company again for eight years.
This means this won’t be able to be repeated, which is good news for unsuspecting people.

By now, you would think it couldn’t really get any worse.
I’d discovered the cosmetic issues, and the foundation issues underneath the deck. But there were unfortunately more surprises.
Dave had built a retaining wall (see in the image below) that I decided to have inspected by an engineer, as I didn’t know if it was safe given Dave’s work on the foundations.

I really need to emphasise that I don’t know a lot about retaining walls or building for that matter, and that’s why I wanted to pay a professional to take care of it. From my perspective and limited knowledge, what Dave had built below looked good and I assumed was safe however what I was to learn was far from the truth.

The engineers report on the retaining wall stated the following:

To fix the retaining wall Dave created, is going to be an extra $10K+GST, on top of the $24K cost to demolish and replace the deck (as per the Disputes Tribunal court order). That’s $34K in total to fix Dave’s work.
To his credit, Dave did pay $9K to cover the retaining wall reparation, which I am thankful for however I’m still left with a debt of $23K I will have to pay personally, when all I was trying to do was hire a professional to do a job.

The remaining debt sits with a company Dave hasn’t filed a return for so it’s being struck off. He has started another company called Pink Cloud Limited and is posting photos on various Facebook groups around Christchurch. When I saw this post from Dave prospecting to build a house it sent shivers down my spine. That just feels illegal. I’m angry and frustrated but don’t want anyone to go through this same experience so have setup this website.

Unfortunately, I’m seeing posts like this below which means for some people it is already too late.

9th MARCH 2024

By this time, more people were discovering dodgy work done by Dave, and so he and his wife Mandy Driver vacated their rental in the middle of the night, but not without leaving rubbish and a bunch of unpaid bills which turned into another successful tenancy Tribunal claim against the pair (link to the order). It was quite some mess that Dave had built for himself, and people were finally finding out.
The Press heard about Dave and he made the front page of the newspaper here in Christchurch. Traffic on this website really ramped up after that.

5th July 2024

The LBP board found in their review that Dave had committed the disciplinary offences on the deck.

So pretty much a year went by, and not a lot happened. Dave disappeared really. I heard of more people he’d ripped off, had tools stolen by him and more horror stories. I sat back and wondered if this was the end of it. A dodgy tradesman, who did dodgy work could just skip town. That’s when I thought I’d try again the Disputes Tribunal route, and instead of getting the order in his now defunct company name, I’d go through it again but this time in his personal name. This meant, any warrant would be issued in a personal capacity. It was worth a shot.

17th March 2025

Stoked to have had this decision in my favour after such a long process. So next steps will be that he won’t pay this, and I can go through the court process of getting the warrant issued in his name. It’s been an interesting process to go through and I have learnt a lot.

10th June 2025

Dave has appealed for a rehearing, so as per law we have to go through that process. I have seen that he has setup another company which you can see below. I believe this may constitute phoenix company activity, where a new company is created to avoid liabilities of a previous one. It may also raise issues under section 151(2) of the Companies Act 1993, if there are grounds for disqualification as a director due to his obviously recent dishonest behavior.

24th June 2025

Common sense prevails.
We had the disputes tribunal call to hear Dave’s reasons for another hearing. His reasons were that (1) he was in Spain and it wasn’t convenient to go to the hearing and he didn’t have a phone and
(2) his documents like invoices etc were in a shipping container and he didn’t have access to them. Dave didn’t seem to understand that his invoices were sent through to me by email, and that I had access and had provided them to the courts.
It appears that in a digital world, it’s getting harder and harder to duck and weave.

Here’s what I’ve learnt throughout this experience:

If there’s one takeaway from my experience, it’s this: your reputation is your most valuable asset. No matter how skilled you are or how many businesses you start, the way you treat people — clients, suppliers, employees — always follows you. In an age where information is easily shared and trust is hard-earned, cutting corners or ignoring accountability isn’t just unethical — it’s short-sighted.

The work you do and the way you do it leaves a trail. And in the long run, character outweighs credentials. So for anyone in business: build something you’re proud of, not just on paper, but in how people speak about you when you’re not in the room.

If you’re considering hiring Dave Driver, under any of the companies he operates I recommend doing your due diligence first, something I should have done. While I’ve learnt the hard way, I sincerely hope that this website and my experience helps you in some way.
I’ve since hired a construction company to demolish and completely rebuild the entire deck and retaining wall and while it’s been a difficult and extremely costly experience hiring David Driver, it’s good to be able to put an end to it.

Watch the owner of the new construction company’s video below if you want to see how bad it was underneath the deck.

Dave has banned my FB account so I can longer see where he’s posting, But if you see a post by Dave on Facebook, just pop this link in a comment https://ihireddaviddriver.com/ to share Dave’s work.