Dealer-Owned vs Company-Owned Forecourts: Who Pays for the Repair (NZ)
- PotholeExpert
- 11 hours ago
- 5 min read
Two forecourts can fly the same brand and look identical from the road, yet the answer to "who fixes the pothole by pump three" is completely different. On a company-owned site, head office or a national facilities team procures the work and pays for it. On a dealer-owned or franchised site, the operator on the forecourt has to find the contractor, approve the spend and sign the cheque. That single line on the lease decides how fast a defect gets sorted, who carries the risk while it sits, and how much sign-off you need before anyone turns a saw.
This page is for the dealer-operator or franchisee who owns the surface problem in practice, even when the sign over the canopy says otherwise. The company-owned path differs and we cover it too, but the safety duty and the asphalt do not change.
The ownership split, and why it decides everything
Fuel networks in New Zealand run a mix of company-owned-and-operated sites and dealer-owned or franchised ones. What matters for a repair is who controls the maintenance budget and the procurement decision:
Company-owned and operated. Head office or a national facilities team holds the maintenance budget and procures repairs centrally, often through a panel of approved contractors. The site manager flags the defect; someone else approves and pays.
Dealer-owned or franchised. The operator runs the site under a supply or franchise agreement but carries the day-to-day operating costs, and the forecourt surface very often sits inside that. You see the defect, you scope it, you pay for it. Brand standards may still apply, but the decision and the cost are yours.
Read your lease or franchise agreement before assuming. The surface is sometimes a landlord or head-office responsibility even on a dealer site, and sometimes a tenant cost on a company-managed one. The line between "structural" and "operational" maintenance is where most disputes live.
On a dealer site: you are the buyer and the duty-holder
If you operate a dealer-owned forecourt, two things land on you at once: you are the buyer, and you carry the health-and-safety duty for the trading surface. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA), whoever runs the forecourt as a business is a PCBU with a section 36 primary duty for that surface, on three fronts: slips and trips on a wet, oily apron; vehicle movement around customers on foot; and the tanker hardstand. A failing surface touches all three, and the duty does not wait for the paperwork. The HS (Hazardous Substances) Regulations 2017 sit alongside HSWA and shape how any work near fuel is controlled.
The advantage of being the buyer is speed. With no national panel to clear, you can get a defect scoped, priced and booked directly, which on a 24/7 site is often the difference between fixing it this week and watching it spread.
On a company-owned site: the procurement path is the gate
If your site is company-owned, the constraint is rarely money and almost always process. The repair is paid for centrally, but it has to clear a procurement gate first: an approved-contractor check, a purchase order, sometimes a regional sign-off. The defect sits longer because the approval has to travel.
What moves it faster is giving the facilities approver a clean decision rather than a vague problem. We produce a dated, by-zone photo report naming the defect, the method and a fixed price, which an approver can attach to a purchase order and sign, so the site manager is not left translating "the forecourt is breaking up" into something procurement can action.
Why a forecourt fails faster than an ordinary car park
Whoever pays, the surface degrades faster here than anywhere else, through three compounding causes:
The fuel dissolves the binder. Bitumen is itself a hydrocarbon, and petrol, diesel and oil soften and dissolve it. The attack concentrates under the nozzles and along the kerbs where spills land, so the apron ravels first.
Point loads strip the mat. Tankers and heavy goods vehicles put concentrated point loads and turning shear through the surface, peeling the mat off the base where they brake and turn.
Ponding kills the base. Once water sits, it saturates the base and drops its bearing strength, so the next load punches through.
Treat any "percentage of binder lost in so many hours" figure as indicative rather than NZ-verified; the pattern is real, the precise rate is not.
The method depends on the hazardous-area plan, not the budget
The forecourt is a classified hazardous area under AS/NZS IEC 60079.10.1:2022, with Zone 0, 1 and 2 around the dispensers, fill points and vents, recorded on the site hazardous-area plan that WorkSafe NZ guidance treats as the controlling document. Ignition sources, flame, spark, hot surfaces and non-rated electrical gear, are prohibited in-zone. This governs the method for both owners, not the money:
In-zone, standard hot-mix asphalt runs at roughly 140 to 160 degrees and is an ignition source, as is petrol-powered compaction plant. So in-zone work either uses cold-mix or low-temperature, spark-free methods, or it requires isolation, atmospheric gas testing to confirm the lower explosive limit is near zero, and a hot-work permit.
Outside the zone, on the entry, exit and general parking, conventional hot-mix with a saw-cut-and-seal joint applies as usual.
We never state a zone radius in metres; the dimensions are site-specific and set by the standard. The hazardous-area plan is the source of truth, and the method is agreed against it before anyone mobilises. The fixed-price discipline behind a permanent asphalt pothole repair still applies; the zone just dictates which method we may use.
Keeping the site trading through the work
Neither owner wants the forecourt closed, so the work stages pump by pump. We isolate, bag and cone one island, keep the rest selling, and bring it back in sequence. Cold-mix in-zone returns a lane the same shift; any hot-mix relay outside the zone runs overnight or in a quiet window. A spotter manages the interface with live traffic, we schedule around the tanker-delivery window, and the sequence runs as a signed method statement under your permit-to-work system. The staging logic is the same one in our car park repair guide; a live forecourt just adds the hazardous-zone constraint.
What both owners get, and how to start
Whether you are a dealer-operator spending your own money or a site manager building a case for head office, the deliverable is built to make the decision easy: a fixed price from a photo with a free condition report by zone (no call-out fee), a method matched to the hazardous-area plan, and a dated, by-zone before-and-after photo report that doubles as your HSWA file record. Our forecourt repair overview walks through the live-fuel safety regime in full.
Send a photo of the worn apron, the pitting under a pump or the pothole in the entry lane, with the site address and a note of whether you are dealer-operated or company-owned. You get a fixed price to approve yourself or pass straight to your facilities approver.
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