An “empathetic” Auckland man bought a 100-year-old cottage damaged in the extreme weather conditions that wreaked havoc in the Coromandel.
The buyer enquired about the Tararu Road property on the outskirts of Thames on Wednesday, viewed it on Thursday and bought it cash and unconditional on Friday for $362,500 – just $1750 less than the asking price.
The cottage was initially listed for sale in March this year with a declared auction reserve of $380,000. The auction didn’t go ahead, and the vendors switched tactics. Last month, they put an asking price on the property, initially $375,000 then $369,000.
Harcourts Thames branch manager and auctioneer Steven Bridson said the purchaser was in the construction industry and had the expertise to fix the red-stickered home.
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“We had a gentleman have a look and saw it was great value and he had the ability and know-how.”
He already had ties to a family property an hour further north of Thames in the Coromandel and was looking for a bolthole closer to Auckland. “They wanted the opportunity to fix this up and have a place by the sea.”
While the damage was not obvious to the untrained eye, the issues included re-levelling the piling needed and a new retaining wall.
Bridson said they had received a lot of interest in it, but some people had walked away after realising exactly what was involved.
The long-term owners Jack and Nelly Morrison were “ecstatic” with the sale especially after two earlier contracts on the property had already fallen over.
Jack and Nelly Morrison are "ecstatic" their cottage of 20 years had finally sold. Photo / Supplied
“They were so relieved that when an offer came in I could say well it’s in your hands – as soon as you sign this document, it’s sold.”
He said the buyer was a “breath of fresh air” and had been “empathetic” towards the sellers’ situation.
“He didn’t want to muck them around ... he just wanted to give them a clean-cut deal and was very flexible around when they moved out and that sort of stuff.
“He actually cared about the vendors and the situation.”
The quick deal meant the owners could now go ahead and purchase another property in Thames they had been eyeing up.
The Morrisons had lived in the home for 20 years and were well-known in the community having run the Tararu Store for three years in the late 1990s, which is when they decided to buy the neighbouring cottage.
The house still had original kauri flooring and was built in the 1920s as a teacher’s house for the nearby former Thames North School, which is now known as the Thames Cultural Centre. It was also, according to Nelly, the birthplace of Farmers Trading’s famous cockatoo Hector who was the store’s mascot for 44 years.
Bridson said interest in the property had surged about two weeks ago and they had fielded “double-digit” enquiries on some days, coinciding with when some banks dropped their interest rates ahead of the August OCR announcement.
“There was this confidence or this talk and it just seemed it coincided with that.”
Last year Bridson sold an uninhabitable house further along on the Thames Coast, in Thorndon Bay, at a $1 reserve auction. The property, which had been damaged by a slip in the same storm, eventually sold for $375,000 in a competitive auction. The owner cleared the damaged house and has parked a caravan on it.
He said there were more properties in the district that had suffered damage in the storms so he was not expecting more to be listed in ‘as is, where is’ condition.
Meanwhile a one-bedroom, one-bathroom property at 5 Strange Road in Waiomu is for sale and, according to Bridson, was the “cheapest home on the largest bit of land”. It is for sale for $475,000 after having its price slashed from $510,000 and has an RV of $560,000.
- Click here to find more properties for sale in the Coromandel
