A two-bedroom townhouse in Auckland's Stonefields earned its owners more than $350,000 in the space of just two years.
The 87sqm property was scooped up at a Barfoot and Thompson auction this week for $1.325 million, setting a new price record for the suburb.
Interest in the Vialou Lane townhouse was huge, with up to 30 groups viewing the property.
Barfoot & Thompson agent Liz de Vere, who marketed the property with David Gee, said that the extraordinary price was driven by three strong bidders at the auction.
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“It appealed to first-home buyers, investors and downsizers,” she said.
“People might be reading that prices are dipping or flattening, but that’s not true at all, not just at Stonefields, but pretty much everywhere,” she added, pointing to the recent sale of a four-bedroom property in Royal Oak for $2.15m.
OneRoof data shows that this year's top sale price in the suburb was $2.352m, for a five-bedroom house in Kauriki Terrace in April. That same house changed hands two years ago for $1.625m, giving the sellers a gain of $727,000 on paper at least.
Campbell Dunoon, auction manager at Barfoot & Thompson, says that while there’s been talk of hesitancy in the market, there are exceptions.
Another house in the terrace at Vialou Lane, Stonefields, Auckland set a record in May when it sold for $1.225m Photo / Supplied
The top price in Stonefields this year was $2.352m for a five-bedroom home on Kauriki Terrace, Stonefields, in April. Photo / Supplied
“Broadly, anything within five or six kilometres of the city centre is still very much sought after. In the inner city, we’re regularly seeing lots of bidding for the $2m to $6m properties but now that's spreading out to places like Stonefields," he said.
“The big thing that has changed for New Zealanders is that earlier hesitancy of buying into new developments where all the properties look the same has gone. Now people like the continuity of streetscapes, the good style and quality builds, you know what you’re getting.
“It’s now considered an acceptable alternative to a home that’s 50 years old that doesn’t have that quality guarantee.”
Scarcity helps. OneRoof Valocity data show that just 32 properties in the tightly-held suburb have changed hands in the last six months, and only 115 in the year since Covid lockdown, driving the median value in Stonefields up 28% to $1.777m.
The sale comes as the latest figures from the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand show that 35% of New Zealand property sales are now for prices more than $1m – up from 19% of sales in July 2020.
Stonefields was built in 2006 as a master-planned community. Photo / Supplied
Stonefields price trends match the rest of central Auckland, where median prices have jumped 31% on last July to $1.3m. The total number of properties sold in Auckland central is down 335 to just 760.
For the rest of Auckland, the number of properties sold this July is the same as July last year, the first full month of activity post-lockdown. A record number of those sales were by auction; more than a quarter of all properties, 26.5%, sold under the hammer - the highest proportion of July auctions since records began.
REINZ chief executive Jen Baird said, “What we see this July is far more aligned to the usual winter sales numbers, albeit in a high demand, supply-constrained market.”
