A stunning architect-designed house on Auckland’s blue-chip waterfront set the top price for settled residential sales in 2022.
The four-bedroom home on Marine Parade, Herne Bay, designed by acclaimed architects Stevens Lawson, sold for $20.75 million, according to OneRoof records. The deal was in June 2022, but has just appeared in the records.
The sale kicked off a chain of three property sales in Herne Bay at the end of last year worth nearly $40m in what the agents from Wall Real Estate, who handled the deal, call a “domino of deals”.
The off-market deal for the Marine Parade home was done by Graham Wall and sons Ollie and Andrew Wall. Ollie had earlier told OneRoof that over the years multiple buyers had tried to get their hands on the property, which has a tennis court and infinity pool, and had been extensively updated since it last sold in 2012 for $11m.
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“Finally the owners said ‘we’re ready’,” he said, adding that the $12.5m CV was meaningless.
Graham Wall, with sons Andrew, left, and Ollie, said off-market deals for top-end properties will be more prevalent for them in 2023. Photo / Fiona Goodall
“People look at the CV of these waterfront properties and know they mean nothing. The numbers don’t take into account there might be only one of these sales a year, if that, so the stats have nothing to base [their algorithm] on.”
Records show the only recent sale of more than $20m on Marine Parade was for an extensively modernised villa a few doors down that sold for $23.5m in September 2020. The concrete house on a 2688sqm section with its own private beach, that was renovated 15 years ago by architects Sumich Chaplin, sold to developer Kurt Gibbons and his wife Makere, who intend to spend $7m on a remodel.
Only one other residential sale last year topped $20m. That was for an off-market deal of $20m for a renovated house on Paritai Drive, next door to New Zealand’s most expensive home, which records show settled in May 2022. A house on Arney Road in Remuera fetched $16m.
One of 2022's biggest sales, the more than $24m paid in a hush-hush deal for the Victoria Avenue mansion of financier Martyn Reesby, announced in October, has not yet appeared in official settled sales records.
A gated villa with its own beach access on Marine Parade sold for $23.5m in 2020. Photo / Fiona Goodall
By comparison, in 2021, three houses sold for more than $20m, with a fourth fetching $19.75m and three others selling for more than $15.6m. Wall Real Estate also set the record price for 2021, when it sold a Remuera Road house by Sumich Architects for $29m in December. It was the third-highest price for a residential property in New Zealand, and the highest for Remuera.
Houses on Argyle Street in Herne Bay and Arney Road in Remuera each fetched $22m.
However, these prices are eclipsed only by the $38.5m paid by Chinese businessman Stone Shi for financier Mark Hotchin’s home on Paritai Drive, in a deal also brokered by the Walls, and the $32.5m paid for a country mansion on Mahoenui Valley Road, in Auckland’s Coatesville. The property was the former home of Kim Dotcom and was picked up in 2016 by ZURU Toys founders, the Mowbray family.
The Walls declined to talk about the details of either sale, which were both off-market, or identify the buyers or sellers.
“Confidentiality is the reason people use our brand, so we can’t make any comment,” Graham Wall said.
Last year's top price was for a modern home on Remuera Road that sold for $29m. The luxury property, not identified in this picture, is the suburb’s most expensive. Photo / Chris Tarpey
“We are grateful that we were number one again, and extremely humbled that people trust us with their most valuable asset.”
Wall said he expected off-market deals at the high end would dominate sales this year. While around 50% of their deals in the past couple of years were off-market – matching buyers and sellers without a formal listing campaign – he estimates around 75% of the company’s sales will be done that way in 2023.
“Ours is such a little section of the market, so we kind of know everyone. If someone calls from Singapore saying ‘we want X’, we can say ‘here are the two properties that could interest you’.
A Victoria Avenue mansion in Remuera sold at the end of 2022 for more than $24m, but has not yet appeared in the settled sales records. Photo / Supplied
“People are selling for exactly the same reasons they always sell – kids starting or finishing school, not needing the big family house. They know that something has changed, things are taking a little longer to sell, but we expect the same sales as last year and already have some [secret sales] scheduled, way ahead of last year’s off-market sales.”
Wall said over the summer enquiries from expats, home for the first time since Covid, have jumped to about 50% of buyers, particularly for Waiheke Island properties.
“But they’re a bit surprised at how expensive it is, prices at this level haven’t dropped.”
