0.69g/m³
Median value of the 98 historic drill holes and samples behind the Hokitika top ten. Almost none of that ground has been re-drilled with modern methods.
South Island gold · pilot
Find the ground everyone else forgot.
Lepro reads a century of open-file exploration reports and historic newspapers, lays them over today's permits, geology and land status, and ranks the open ground worth a look. Every number is cited to the page it came from.
- Onshore cells scored
- 155,326
- Reports read page by page
- 138
- Ranked targets, South Island
- 50
The Hokitika district in Lepro. Figures from the 18 October 2026 runs; the archive keeps growing, so later runs can reorder targets.
The problem
Decades of reports nobody reads. Ground that lapses quietly.
New Zealand's open-file archive holds a century of exploration: Mines Department bore logs from the 1920s and 30s, company reports, assay tables and hand-drawn plans. Most of it is scanned paper. It is free to download and almost nobody re-reads it.
So ground with recorded pay drops out of a permit and back onto the register without anyone noticing, and applicants choose ground on a hunch, a forum post or a weeks-long consultant's desk study.
61of 551
Permit applications NZP&M rejected outright in 2025 for not meeting a basic standard. Source
NZ$3,450
Non-refundable fee for a prospecting or exploration permit application, before a single day in the field.
2024-11
When a permit over one open Hokitika target lapsed. The brief flags it: find out why before you apply.
How it works
Data, then evidence, then ranked ground, then a brief.
- 01 Data
- 02 Evidence
- 03 Ranked ground
- 04 Brief
01
Data
Today's register, the land and the rocks
Every permit, application and lapse from the NZP&M register, refreshed daily, on one map with the land you cannot touch and the geology underneath.
- Current, proposed and historic permits, Schedule 4 and excluded land
- DOC conservation land, with where an access arrangement is possible
- GNS QMAP geology and faults, recorded gold sites, dredges and drillholes
02
Evidence
Every page read, every number cited
Scanned reports are transcribed page by page, and a second, independent read checks every number. Where the two disagree the page is flagged, not quietly smoothed over.
- Drill logs, samples and workings extracted with a verbatim quote and page
- Old units converted: pence per cubic yard at the printed gold price to g/m³
- Historic newspapers from Papers Past located on the map, quote included
03
Ranked ground
An explainable score for every cell
A gold model scores the ground cell by cell, from 250 m in a district to 1 km across the island, and draws the best blocks into targets you can rank, filter and open.
- Each score breaks down into named drivers you can check
- Schedule 4, national park and closed reserve land score zero
- Where no report has been read yet, report evidence counts as unknown, not as zero
04
Brief
A brief you can act on, and check
Each target comes with what you would need to get on the ground, written for the person who has to lodge the application.
- Land status: holders, expiry dates and other people's applications nearby
- The permit pathway, access arrangements and consents you would need
- A first field step, the caveats and an honest confidence label
Who it's for
For the people who have to decide about a piece of ground.
Prospectors and syndicates
Choose ground before you spend the application fee and a field season. See the old pay, who holds what next door, and which applications are ahead of you.
Area Gold Brief · Ground Review · Ground Watch
Small explorers and consultants
Area selection and desk studies in a day rather than weeks: every extracted grade and hole with its page image, work history by holder, GIS and CSV exports.
Desk Study Pack · Data licence
Landowners and iwi
What has been recorded under your land, who holds or has applied for permits around it, and what an access arrangement means for you. In plain language.
Landowner and iwi report
Investors and analysts
Factual evidence on a company's New Zealand permits: tenure history, prior work and results in the open-file record. No opinions on companies or securities.
Investor evidence pack
Sample brief
One target, as it appears in a brief.
This is target 3 of the Hokitika district brief, lightly trimmed. The quoted lines are verbatim from 1930s Mines Department drill logs, with the report and page they came from. Applicant names are left out here.
- Values are historic report values, converted and cited, not resources
- Land status from the loaded layers, with the gaps stated
- Caveats are part of the brief, not a footnote
Paroa / Saltwater Creek
Alluvial · 438 ha · at Paroa, West Coast
0.50score
Why
- Model drivers (0–1): old gold evidence with little modern drilling 1.00; drilling 0.95; gold-bearing gravels 0.66; gold values in archived reports 0.46.
- 15 gold values from old reports near it; best 1.37 g/m³, median 0.69; holes 4–12 m deep.
- Geology (QMAP): Holocene ocean beach and river deposits.
From the archive (verbatim, page cited)
MR1092 p.10 1934 · drill log 1.37 g/m³, 7 m to bedrock
“Depth to bedrock: 24' Total depth: 35'”
MR1160 p.3 1936 · drill log 1.22 g/m³, 6 m hole
“7 | 21 " | 44·152 d. | 28·846 d.”
Land status
Essentially unheld (under 5% inside a current permit); 2 other applications within 1.4 km.
First field step
Re-locate the old drill lines from MR1160 and MR1092 on the ground, then auger or test-pit two or three of the reported pay holes to check the old values before anything bigger.
Caveats
- The outline takes in part of Paroa itself: houses, roads and the highway are not available ground. Trim the target to the open paddocks.
- Old drill logs use local grids; holes are pinned to the named flat, not their exact spot.
- A permit here lapsed recently (2024-11): find out why before applying.
What a Lepro brief is not
- Not a JORC or NI 43-101 Public Report. Not prepared or reviewed by a Competent Person, and not for publishing to investors.
- Not investment advice. No buy, sell or valuation opinions on companies or securities.
- Not a licence to dig. You still need a permit, access arrangements and landowner consent. Every brief says which.
Look at the ground before you lodge the application.
Lepro is in pilot on the South Island. Tell us the area you are looking at and we will send you a brief, or create an account and order one.