- Georgia and Luke Marris Smith sold their renovated 1940s Mount Wellington home for $1.6 million.
- They also listed a 489sqm section from their property for $849,000, potentially earning over $1m.
- The couple renovated the house over four years, adding a bathroom and redesigning the layout.
A championship swimmer and her carpenter husband have come out on top after taking a risk on a damp and dated home in Auckland's Mount Wellington.
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Georgia and Luke Marris Smith slogged their guts out for four years bringing the 1940s house up to modern standards and have been rewarded for their efforts, selling it at auction for $1.6 million to a buyer who had only seen it two days earlier.
And there's more money to be made. The 489sqm section they carved off the back of their Rutland Road property is on the market for sale for $849,000. A buyer at that price would mean a total return on their investment of more than $1m.
The three-bedroom house on Rutland Road, Mount Wellington, sold for $1.6m after a complete renovation. Photo / Supplied
A listing photo of the house from when the couple bought it. Back then it was damp and cold. Photo / Supplied
The couple began house-hunting in mid-2020. Georgia, who represented New Zealand at the 2018 Commonwealth Games and 2017 World University Games, had been living in Florida on an athletic scholarship, and was keen to come home.
They started looking just as the market was taking off and were just “blown out of the water" by the competition they encountered in the auction rooms.
They quickly realised they needed to widen their search to more affordable suburbs. It was then that they came across the house at Rutland Road. It belonged to an elderly couple who were retiring to a beach town and needed work.
“It was damp, it was cold, it was quite boxed off and there was no flow to the house. But it had a big backyard and we saw it had development potential,” Luke told OneRoof.
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The auction had been brought forward by another buyer’s offer so the couple had only a week and a half to get their ducks in a row. At the auction, they pushed themselves to the limit but it worked (“we were a bit panicky,” said Luke).
Once they moved into the three-bedroom house - with some flatmates to help pay the bills - the couple spent the next few figuring out how to add an extra bathroom and shuffle the floorplan.
A smart redesign opened up the kitchen and living spaces into one room, with the kitchen flipped to the front of the house and the living opening out to the new deck and landscaped backyard.
The house was reroofed and rewired, re-gibbed, insulation added in walls and ceilings and all new double-glazed aluminium window joinery was added. A hazardous old staircase to the lower level garage was closed in to make an ensuite bathroom, and the original bathroom was rearranged to make room for a smart laundry. With walls gone, there was room for a smart kitchen and island in the newly open plan living space.
What the living room used to look like. Photo / Supplied
The new open plan living room and kitchen flipped the two rooms and opened them out to decks front and back. Photo / Supplied
Covid hit the couple again: they had just finished internal demolition in mid-2021 when Auckland went back into lockdown and they had to pause for five weeks until work could resume. Luke credits their friend and builder Josh Phillips, of JP Builders, with the brilliant work, while Georgia discovered she had a skill for interior design.
The couple were back in the house by Christmas 2021 and finished the landscaping and subdivision work. They only decided to sell because they are expecting their first baby next year and have a business opportunity in Mount Maunganui.
Luke said the auction result was very satisfying. “Just to know how much work we have put into the property. From the outside people can go, ‘Oh they’ve just got an auction and they’ve developed, they’re so lucky’, but they don’t see the amount of work that goes into it.
“So to get a result in this kind of market is really quite cool,” he said, adding that first success has fired the couple up for their next project. Just not quite yet, as the new baby will take priority.
The 489sqm section at the rear of the property is asking $849,000. Photo / Supplied
Ray White agent Matt Gibson said that buyer interest in the house was tremendous.
“We had about 70 groups through, lots of re-visits and inspections. It was a mix of young professional couples and downsizers. Luke and Georgia had done an outstanding job – we had three builders through and all of them said that,” he said.
“The buyer had only seen the place on the Monday, a young guy with his mum buying his first house. To be honest, I’d not picked him as the buyer, he was a dark horse, bidding by phone.”
Gibson said that as well as the nine bidders, he also had a backlist of conditional buyers who were hoping to get an offer in if the house didn’t sell under the hammer.
The agent said that while not every auction gets away like the one for Rutland Road, really good quality places will always be popular. The agent expects the back section to sell quickly as there are few large sites left in the suburb for single family homes.
- 13A Rutland Road, Mount Wellington, Auckland is asking $849,000
