– A South Island investor is selling her Auckland apartment for as little as $20,000 due to weather-tightness issues.
– Costly remediation work is expected next year, with repairs estimated to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
– The apartment, returning $630 a week in rent, is targeted at investors with high-risk tolerance.
A South Island investor wants rid of her Auckland apartment so badly that she is willing to let it go for as little as $20,000.
She paid $448,500 for the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment at 3B/21 Hargreaves Street, in Freemans Bay, in 2006. But she wants out because of weather-tightness issues affecting the apartment block.
City Sales sales manager Scott Dunn told OneRoof that costly remediation work was due to start on the five-level apartment block sometime next year.
The apartment is rented out for $630 a week. Photo / Supplied
His client did not want to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the repairs or deal with the stress of the situation.
Listing agent James Mairs is pitching the property, which returns $630 a week in rent, at “speculators, opportunists, traders and plunderers”.
Dunn felt the most likely buyer would be an investor with a high tolerance for risk. First-home buyers were a no-no, he added.
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“That $300,000 or so that you need, you can’t ask the bank for that unless you have a lot of property,” he told OneRoof.
“It suits someone who owns more than one property and can withstand a couple of years of bills and things, but would be confident that at the other end they would have a product that is far superior and much more valuable that they can sell on for a profit.”
Dunn estimated the remediated apartment would fetch between $800,000 and $900,000 in the current market.
The apartment has views of Sky Tower. Photo / Supplied
The apartment block was just off College Hill and a very “fun part of town”, near Victoria Park. “It rubs shoulders with Herne Bay, St Marys Bay, and Ponsonby. It’s like super central without being CBD,” he said.
“Young people shouldn’t buy it unless they’ve got stacks of money, but the area is really made for cool, fashionable people.”
Within a few hours of the listing going live on Thursday, the agents were receiving inquiries. “I’m very confident we are going to find out what the market rate is,” Dunn said.
21 Hargreaves Street should not be confused with the troubled apartment block at 23 Hargreaves Street, which has attracted negative headlines over the years.
Residents of The Ridge, at 23 Hargreaves Street, were in a hole because they could not find the funds needed to repair the building.
In a last-ditch attempt to salvage some money from the situation, they applied for and won court approval to cancel their unit titles, so they could sell the land beneath the leaky and defective apartments.
– 3B/21 Hargreaves Street, in Freemans Bay, Auckland, goes to auction on September 17