The owner of a three-bedroom house in Palmerston North who took a gamble on selling it at auction with a $1 reserve has walked away with $400,000.
James Faber told The Hits’ Breakfast with Jono and Ben this morning that he was feeling nervous ahead of the auction for the Clyde Crescent home, but he was determined to sell – even for the declared reserve – to offload the property.
The risk paid off with the auction for the ex-1950s state house attracting more than 20 registered bidders including 10 and 15 people who put their hands up for it.
Bidding opened at $100,000 and swiftly rose from there. Once it reached $370,000, two phone bidders were left battling out and it eventually sold to a Wellington investor who viewed the property only yesterday.
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Property Brokers listing agent Pollie Ensing said most people who bid on the property were investors including the underbidder who had been from Auckland. Some had even bid on it without viewing it first.
Ensing said Faber was “really, really, happy” with the auction result.
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“It was probably less than market value, but for him it was done and dusted. These days we are getting so many subject to sale and subject to finance and he can now pay his mother back and get on with the next steps.”
Faber had admitted this morning that going for a rock-bottom reserve was “a bit crazy”, but he was having to take action because he had run into problems with another property he owned in the city. “I had a hard time selling another property. I didn't want to put up with all of that stuff again. So this one, I just wanted it sold.”
The home, Faber said, had a “heat pump and a wood burner and all the insulation, and an extraction fan. There’s a great tenant there at the moment paying 500 bucks a week.”
Faber told The Hits that he actually wanted a bit more than $1 for the house. “The agent appraised it at $480,000 at the start when I was listing it with her and I agreed and said that ‘yeah, that’s about what I thought in this market’. I had been just hoping to achieve somewhere in the early fours, you know, below market value, but there's not a single first-home buyer interested in this property.”
Faber said this week that he was selling up because he had to repay a $300,000 loan to his mother.
“I bought this other development project a year and a half ago, and expected to have the old house sold and at least one new-build sold by then to pay mum back, but as you can expect everything has dragged on and dragged on,” he said.
The sale of Clyde Crescent, in Roslyn, follows several others that have set their reserve at $1. Last month, a South Auckland townhouse sold under the hammer for $641,200 after being advertised with a $1 reserve and in December a problematic box-style cottage on Auckland’s North Shore sold for almost half a million dollars.
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