– Two brothers sold their Sandringham property for over $5.1 million, breaking the suburb’s record.
– The 2595sqm plot is zoned for development, attracting a buyer interested in building 25 homes.
– Harcourts agent Aman Gulia highlighted the challenge of finding a buyer due to the property’s size.
Two brothers have broken the sale price record for their suburb after the house they’ve owned for almost 40 years sold for just over $5.1 million this month.
Harcourts listing agent Aman Gulia convinced the buyer to $1 more than the previous record holder, telling OneRoof that his vendors deserved it.
“We just wanted to break the record. This is one of the biggest pieces of land in Sandringham. The vendors have had that property for a long time, and they deserved every single penny,” Gulia told OneRoof.
The buyer, however, wasn’t interested in their three-bedroom villa or the one-bedroom house in the back garden. The reason he was willing to pay a record amount – and one-and-a-half million dollars above RV – was the land.
Harcourts agent Aman Gulia: “There are not that many people looking at these large sites who have $5m to spend.” Photo / Fiona Goodall
The brothers’ flat 2,595sqm plot on Arabi Street, in Auckland’s Sandringham, is zoned for development and, according to Gulia, could easily fit 25 new homes.
Gulia told OneRoof that finding the right buyer in the current market had been tricky, especially because the brothers wanted to keep the villa as part of the deal.
“The owners were looking for a perfect buyer and came to us with their conditions, and we found the right developer for them,” Gulia said.
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“They wanted to take the house; they wanted the buyer to allow them time to take it away, as they had memories attached to it. They have not got a site yet, so now they will sort that out.”
Gulia said the property’s RV of $3.55m was irrelevant. “What developers care about is, ‘What can we do with the site and how much can we earn from it?'”
Gulia said the developer who bought the property was looking for properties to fill their pipeline. “It is a well-oiled machine. They build high-end stuff.”
Developers paid $1.585m this month for an Art Deco house on Kitchener Road, Sandringham. Photo / Supplied
He noted that the size of the site had actually made the property harder to sell. “There are not that many people looking at these large sites who have $5m to spend. For that land price and size, you are looking at building, say 25 houses, and that starts to add up. The bigger the project, the bigger the risk,” he told OneRoof.
A project on a 600sqm site with five terrace houses was easier to complete and would cost much less.
Gulia said there was an oversupply of townhouses in the city, “but anything that is priced right will sell”.
He pointed to recent sales of four-bedroom townhouses in Mount Albert and Sandringham for prices between $1.1m and $1.48m, and noted that buyers would forego a second car park to get an extra bedroom.
The agent said his team had been busy in the last four weeks, highlighting 20 deals they had closed for $26m. He noted that an Art Deco home on Kitchener Road, in Sandringham, sold for $1.585m this month – $363,000 more than it got in February.
Gulia said the price increase reflected the value of the 600sqm site, which is zoned for apartments and townhouses.
“The development site sales this month show developers are back. When you take out areas that are in flood zones or in the Watercare red zones, there is not much out there. People are looking, which means price increases.”