- A Kiwi expat paid over $12m for a luxury home in Parnell.
- The five-bedroom home was bought one day after the buyer first viewed it.
- The sale is one of the year’s biggest, though below the suburb’s $23.5m record.
An expat paid more than $12 million for a luxury home one day after first setting foot in it.
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The Kiwi buyer, who has lived in Europe for over 30 years, was instantly won over by the modern five-bedroom home on Glanville Terrace, in Auckland’s Parnell.
He had been working the listing agents, Patrick McAteer and Suzanne Browne, from New Zealand Sotheby’s International Realty, to find an Auckland home since August last year.
However, he only saw the property in person last month, with McAteer telling OneRoof he got off the plane on a Monday, inspected the home and went unconditional with an offer the following day.
The over 500sqm house on Glanville Terrace, Parnell, was completed in 2021 and has a 25m pool in a tropical garden setting. Photo / Supplied
The house has luxury finishes throughout with a lift, media room and wine cellar. Photo / Supplied
The agents were unable to disclose the exact sale price but said it was more than $12m. The property, which was built in 2021, had an RV of $10.8m and had been on the market since June last year.
The $12m-plus sale is one of the biggest this year, but it falls short of the suburb record of $23.5m, achieved in 2017 when former Prime Minister Sir John Key sold his mansion on St Stephens Avenue.
McAteer said the buyer had to see the property in person before making an unconditional offer.
“It was relatively quick turnaround because it was just subject to the viewing,” he told OneRoof.
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“That’s the thing with real estate, you’ve got to show people. No matter how tight your brief is, you get them through the door and it’s a feeling for them.”
The buyer had been on the hunt for a New Zealand home, “so contacted us through the Sotheby’s international network”, McAteer said.
“It was important to build trust and confidence, because even though he is an expat, his knowledge of Auckland wasn’t great – he hadn’t lived here.”
The agents told OneRoof they drew up a list of homes for the buyer to look at, with the Glanville Terrace home high on the list.
“Over the phone and by email, you show them a range of different properties. You filter it by budget, by desired area. We got a nice brief which enabled us to pinpoint properties,” McAteer said.
Sir John Key in the gardens of the Parnell house he sold in 2017 for $23.5m. The sale price is still the highest for the suburb. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Part of the agents’ job was explaining which parts of Auckland might have the sorts of houses the buyer was interested in and walking them through the cost per-square-metre of building in the city.
“They have just bought the most incredible Sumich Chaplin architectural masterpiece, crafted by the Goode Brothers,” Browne told OneRoof.
Recent sales figures released by the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand show the number of deals at the upper end of the market is up annually. Separate figures from Barfoot & Thompson point to the same trend with sales over $3m in February at their highest level since 2022.
McAteer and Browne hit the headlines last month when OneRoof revealed that they sold to a single buyer two neighbouring properties on Jervois Road, in Auckland’s Herne Bay, for a total of $26m.
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