- Auckland agent Emma Duncan has sold her townhouse for $2.867m.
- The home had featured in season three of The Block NZ.
- Duncan has bought a waterfront home in the same suburb for just over $3m.
Ten years after it first appeared on Kiwi TV screens, a townhouse from season three of The Block NZ has sold for $2.867 million.
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The sale of the three-bedroom home on Newell Street, in Auckland's Point Chevalier, netted its Ray White agent Emma Duncan, a gross profit of more than $1.2m.
And the deal has allowed Duncan to buy a waterfront home a couple of blocks away for just over $3m.
Duncan had fallen in love with the Point Chevalier Road property, but needed to sell her townhouse for the deal to work. She tapped her mum, Anne Duncan, owner of Ray White's Mount Albert office, to help her with the sale.
"Emma didn’t do an auction because she was still doing due diligence on what she was buying so she wanted to make sure the purchase was there,” Anne told OneRoof.
Duncan had bought the Newell Street home in 2015 when she was looking for a place for herself and her then teenage daughter.
The sale made the headlines at the time.
The property had flopped at The Block’s auction finale just five months earlier. Contestants Ben and Quinn Alexandre made just $10,000 from the house sale in November 2014, but their buyer netted a gross profit of almost $300,000 when they sold to Duncan.
In the nine years since she bought, she added a swimming pool, a new deck and landscaping, and updated walls and floors, but with her growing household has needed a bigger house.
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She had found her new home through Point Chev Ray White colleagues Lawrence von Sturmer and Jo de Beer, so it made sense to have them reach out to clients on their database who might be interested in Duncan's townhouse. Duncan's mum then stepped into handle the buts and bolts of the sale.
"Emma didn’t do an auction because she was still doing due diligence on what she was buying so she wanted to make sure the purchase was there,” Anne told OneRoof.
“I did the open homes because I thought it was a bit hard for people to talk to Emma honestly. And we thought the local office might have a buyer in their pocket.”
The Point Chev agents’ buyers, locals on their database who were looking to upgrade from another part of the suburb, saw the townhouse before it hit the market, but it took a couple of weeks to get their offer lined up and unconditional, the Duncans said.
The agents said they had 30 other buyers who had looked at the townhouse and had expressed interest.
In parallel, Emma’s slow and steady march through the due diligence on her waterfront place reached its conclusion and the two deals could close in synch just before Christmas, with moving day slated for February.
Duncan's new house, a sprawling 1970s house with its own beach access had been on the market since the beginning of 2024.
“I wasn’t even house hunting, I was just looking across the city fringe. I saw this waterfront beachfront property and I just fell in love straight away. I do a lot of ocean swimming and water is my happy place,” she told OneRoof.
“There was a lot of due diligence because there are a few overlays on the property. That’s all fine, you just have to learn about them and understand before you rush in. There are only so many beachfront properties you can buy, they’re a great thing but you just have to wrap your head around things like overlays and tree protection.
“You just have to spend quite a bit of money to understand it’s safe for you to proceed, especially since Cyclone Gabriel, everyone’s more cautious."
She said that while the beachside house on the site could have been bowled to make room for a huge new build – a striking concrete house that featured in Grand Designs is nearby - she planned to keep it.
“I work really long hours but now the water is right in my backyard. I can go down for 10 minutes in the morning and have that work-life balance. It’s so beautiful, someone’s swimming right past, you can hear the water lapping when the tide is in,” she said.
Ray White agent Jo de Beer said that the agency always had a list of people living in Point Chevalier who want to move around the suburb.
“Point locals absolutely love living here. They love to upgrade within the area and they don’t tend to leave,” she said, adding that the buyers of the Newell Street townhouse were typical.
Point Chevalier holds the record for the top The Block NZ prices. The townhouses from the 2021 season held in the suburb all broke the $2m barrier and one of the neighbouring Block houses on Newell Street sold for $3.182m in 2021.
Viewers hoping for another season of The Block NZ will have to wait. The show was put on ice last year, with the properties earmarked for the 11th season, four townhouses in Auckland's Browns Bay, hitting the market at the end of last year. Two have sold, with the remaining two still up for grabs.
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