– An out-of-town buyer purchased a Mt Eden home for $7.5m after a brief viewing.
– Agents report a shortage of listings, with high demand for four-bedroom homes between $2.5m and $7m.
– Sharp pricing could re-ignite interest in homes, with some properties needing a 10% price drop.
An out-of-town buyer offered to pay over $7 million for a luxury home in Auckland’s Mount Eden just hours after seeing it, OneRoof can reveal.
Barfoot & Thompson listing agent Linda Galbraith told OneRoof that the buyer called her early on Waitangi Day wanting to visit the four-bedroom Rahiri Road house.
“They got their lawyers in. They’d seen the house for an hour that morning and had their contract on the table that afternoon. They blew everybody out of the water, and they got it.”
Galbraith said the property, which has a large outdoor pool and tennis court, sold for $7.5m, and had attracted a lot of attention when it hit the market at the start of the year.
156A Bassett Road, in Auckland’s Remuera, has an asking price of $3.195m – a lot of house for the money, agents say. Photo / Supplied
Two of the three buyers who had made offers and had missed out were still looking six months later, she said. “If I’d had another two like Rahiri, I could have sold three at once.”
She urged would-be vendors not to hold off putting their homes on the open market. “It’s a miracle if you expect an agent to be able to get you a premium price without having it on the open market,” she said.
Bayleys agent Lisa Pringle agreed there was a dearth of listings in her double grammar zone patch that matched buyer requirements.
“The buyers are not demanding a new kitchen or a pool, they just want four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a bit of grass. And that’s with budgets between $2.5m and $7m,” Pringle told OneRoof.
“Right now, I couldn’t take you to a house like that in Mount Eden or Epsom,” she said, adding that a couple of her most recent sales have been off-market deals where she door-knocked a vendor on behalf of a buyer.
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But sharp pricing may help to re-ignite buyers’ interest in stock they had previously bypassed, said Remuera Bayleys agent Steve Koerber.
He said that while there were at least a dozen good family homes in the $4m to $5m bracket, many of them had been on the market for a while.
“I always say the market is always great at the right price, so if some of these properties just shifted a little bit – probably 10% is enough – they’d sell,” he said.
“If you were a buyer with $4 to $5m to spend today, you’ve picked the eyes out of the market. You’ve seen all 12 of those properties on the market. None of them suited, and so now you’re sitting, waiting.
“If you tweaked the price, say from $5m to $4.5m, that would jolt buyers out of their lounge chairs.”
One of his listings, a five-bedroom Ken Crosson-designed house on Bassett Road, which has an asking price of $3.195m, had received multiple offers because “it’s a lot of house for the money”.
A renovated house in Galatea Terrace, Herne Bay, sold last month for well over its $3.875m RV. Photo / Supplied
Koerber said there was strong demand for done-up villas with pools and garaging on Remuera’s northern slopes. “The owners are not putting them on the market; I can’t convince them.”
Ollie Wall, of Wall Real Estate, told OneRoof that he had just sold a stylishly remodelled villa on Galatea Street, in Herne Bay, for “well in excess” of its pre-renovation RV of $3.875m, and was now pleading for local homeowners to come forward and list.
“It was a quick tender, we don’t usually do them, but we had a handful of offers and it sold on the day,” Wall said. The unrenovated house had sold 18 months earlier for $3.55m, and Wall said the bathroom still needed an update. “People are just desperate for houses in Herne Bay, and there are zero.”
He added: “I understand people’s reasons for not listing in winter, but it’s a deadlock. It’s stalled because there is nothing to buy. We’re calling out for $7m to $10m houses.”