A five-bedroom home in Auckland’s double grammar school zone billed as a “plaster disaster” sold for close to $2 million after a heated auction lasting over an hour.
Harcourts agent Dan Eacock, who marketed the five-bedroom 1990s house on Mount Eden Road with Sudu Srikant, said the vendors were stoked when the hammer came down at $1.995m – $655,000 below CV and after nearly an hour and 15 minutes of battle between four bidders.
It still reaped the owners a profit, on paper at least, of $800,000 over the $1.195m they paid for the place in mid-2006.
Eacock said the owners knew when they bought the property 17 years ago that it had weathertightness issues and had ambitions to fully renovate it before it got worse. However, they moved out to a home in Clover Park, leaving friends to reside in the Mount Eden house rent-free so their children could go to the zoned schools.
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“It got completely worse, there was even a hole in the kitchen and a toilet that the plumbing had burst so there was a complete hole. You could look up and see where the toilet had been,” he said. He added that now that their friends’ children had finished school and the owners had plans to buy another house, they decided to see what the market would pay for the leaky property.
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The property was sold in an “as is, where is” condition, Eacock said, so potential buyers had to meet conditions prior to the auction so they understood what they were buying.
“We didn’t actually have a building report, and in the end no one actually did. One of the bidders on the day clearly was a bit of a builder.”
Eacock said that bidding started at $1.225m for the home, which had a CV of $2.65m, but there were four bidders keen to get a slice of double grammar zone for a bargain price.
Most buyers were planning to bowl the leaky house and use the very good foundations to rebuild, perhaps with two homes on the site. Photo / Supplied
“We had homeowners looking to do a renovation to small-scale developers who build like one or two dwellings, it was a bit of a mixture. Those guys were looking to bowl the place and start again, build up from the foundation because the foundation was very good.
“The costs of redoing the cladding, you’re looking probably looking at $1m, maybe more. So it’s just better for them to bowl it,” he said.
He said the lengthy auction included three pauses for negotiation before the house was declared on the market at $1.9m and sold, after five more bids, for $1.995m.
The buyer was a builder who plans to bowl and rebuild the property, possibly splitting the one-bedroom studio above a garage into a second title on the 575sqm site, the agent said.
The owners had originally planned to renovate the house themselves, but instead allowed friends with school-age kids to reside rent-free. Photo / Supplied
“The vendors asked the top two bidders to alter their conditions to more acceptable levels, moving the deposit sizes and date of settlement. The sale settles January 31,” he said.
“Not all potential buyers were open to meeting these conditions prior to the auction, contributing to the initial slow start. And the challenge of no bank ever taking this property as a security which did shrink the buyer pool tremendously,” the agents told OneRoof, but some 50 groups viewed the property.
“There’s serious demand. It was purely location, the grammar zone just brings people there regardless. And there are so many people looking to buy in the area and there’s just not enough stock.
“It just shows if there was more stock right now they’d probably sell because the demand and they’ll probably bring the price up quite a bit.
“The vendors were stoked, they were so happy they were buying us gifts – usually we supply gifts to the vendors,” Eacock said.
“They can go to the next stage of what they want, they were happy with the price, they knew they weren’t the right people to restore the property.”
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