A four-bedroom house in Auckland’s sought-after Hobsonville Point sold unconditionally last weekend for $1.65 million – without any buyers setting foot inside the property.
Harcourts Cooper & Co agent Anna Byron, who marketed the stylish eight-year-old house on 81 Buckley Avenue on Auckland’s North Shore with colleague Rebecca Bennett, told OneRoof that she presented 17 offers on the house over the weekend, two of them unconditional.
“Within an hour we had sold for an unconditional price our vendors were delighted with,” Byron said. The house has a CV of $1.225m, and the sale price is around what the agents had appraised the property for.
The vendors, who are moving to the beach, said they were still pinching themselves after Saturday’s events, which included a Zoom meeting with the agents to review the offers before closing an hour later.
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The house had no for-sale sign outside so buyers were walking by and checking the virtual 3D walk-through on the listing. Photo / Supplied
On Thursday, the agents had already received six offers for the home, and knew they were in a burgeoning multi-offer situation. Writing up the offers using the digital docu-sign process added to the challenge, Byron said.
The early offers were subject to in-person viewings within 24 hours of Auckland getting to level 3.
“But then a couple of buyers took out those conditions, they wanted to be as condition-less as possible,” Byron said.
“There’s been a bit of champagne being drunk. I guess it shows you we didn’t need that for-sale sign.”
Byron and Bennett also have another property - where the buyers have not seen inside - under contract, with a backup, a one-bedroom plus study terrace house on Squadron Drive.
A one-bedroom terrace house on Squadron Drive, Hobsonville, is also under contract without buyers seeing inside. Photo / Supplied
“No-one had set foot in this one either, but I had just sold a very similar one in the terrace that a lot of people had seen. And the 3D walk-through is really the next best thing to being there,” Byron said.
A third property, a four-bedroom end terrace at 76 Buckley Avenue, is also under contract, but the agents had managed to fit in two open homes before lockdown. They are now combing the suburb for other agents’ listing to introduce the buyers who missed out.
A four-bedroom end terrace, also on Buckley Avenue, went under contract in lockdown but had two open homes. Photo / Supplied
“If this lockdown keeps going, we may have vendors doing very good video walk-throughs or use the photos from last time the property was listed. Vendors want to get on the market so we’re starting to look at what avenues we can use.”
Byron said the Buckley Avenue house had a pool, rare in Hobsonville Point, and that eventhough lockdown prevented the front yard for-sale sign going up, plenty of walkers checked out the exterior and then used the virtual 3D walk-through tool to view the interior.
On the first day of lockdown, Bennett and Byron sold a stylishly-renovated, four-bedroom house on Wiseley Avenue, also in Hobsonville Point, at an online auction, with seven bidders pushing the price to $2.25m.
