The highest residential sale for Christchurch so far this year is for a low-key 1970s Merivale home that has links to an attempted murder.
The house on Helmores Lane was sold for $2.945 million by a Christchurch eye surgeon who is currently awaiting sentence for a brutal attack on his former friend.
The New Zealand Herald reported that Dr Ian William Dallison offloaded his home in a private transaction in January this year.
Before the sale, Dr Ian William Dallison had pled guilty to the attempted murder of Alberto Ceccarelli, to whom he owed money.
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The Herald reported that Dallison had fired a bullet at Ceccarelli, narrowly missing him, and then gouged his eye in the struggle that followed.
Dallison is to be sentenced on April 28 over the attack, which took place on August 4 last year.
The sale price is more than $50,000 above the 2022 RV and $2.3m above what the house last sold for in 2001. It is the highest settled sale price for Christchurch so far this year.
The highest sale price for a listed Christchurch property this year is $2.85m, paid at a Harcourts auction last month for a four-bedroom new-build home on Norman Road, in Strowan.
However, OneRoof knows of several 2023 Christchurch sales that have yet to settle that will eclipse the Helmores Lane record – and then some.
A house on Shrewsbury Street, in Merivale, sold under the hammer for $3.925m in March, but the sale has yet to settle. Photo / Supplied
One is the $3.925m sale of a four-bedroom new-build home on Shrewsbury Street, in Merivale. That property, listed by Harcourts Grenadier agent Alison Aitken, sold for more than $200,000 above the reserve at a competitive auction last month.
The highest sale price for a listed Christchurch property last year was $6.8m for a four-bedroom luxury home on Helmores Lane. That deal was also closed by Aitken.
The highest sale price for New Zealand so far this year is $20m, for a mansion on Strathfield Lane, in Whitford, Auckland.
Dallison's house isn't the only home with a grim past to have hit the market this year. The New Zealand Herald reported last month that the Auckland house where health boss Pauline Hanna was found dead in unexplained circumstances had been relisted.
The multi-million-dollar property on Upland Road, in Remuera, is being sold by Hanna's husband Philip Polkinghorne.
Polkinghorne was charged with Hanna’s murder in August last year and pleaded not guilty.
The Upland Road was taken off the market in July 2021 then picked up again by a new agency.
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