A three-bedroom apartment in Wellington's Oriental Bay is vying to be the city's most expensive home.
The 450sqm Parisian-style apartment on Oriental Parade has been listed with an asking price of $6.25 million.
The vendor, Kiwi art collector and philanthropist Chris Parkin, bought the property late last year for $4.31m as a home for his art collection but he is now hoping to cash in on the boom in the capital's housing market.
And if he gets his desired $6.25m, not only will he have made nearly $2m in profit, on paper at least, he will have broken the record for the capital's highest residential real estate sale.
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The record is currently held by a luxury five-bedroom home on Hobson Street, in Thorndon, which sold for $6 million in February after hitting the market with an asking price of more than $7.95m.
Parkin told the New Zealand Herald that his apartment was in a prime location and "absolutely unique".
"The right buyer will be quite happy to pay that sort of money, I think," he said.
The "European-style" apartment block was built in the 1920s. Photo / Supplied
"This has never been on the open market, and these sorts of properties only come up once in someone's lifetime."
Parkin said the apartment block was built on Oriental Parade in the 1920s, adding that it is big enough to have a tennis court on the roof.
"The apartment itself is the only apartment I've seen in Wellington which is very much Parisian in concept, or European if you like," he said.
"The ceilings are 3.2 m with lots of plaster work on the ceilings, and the whole apartment is painted white with dark wooden floors.
"All of the doors in the main part of the apartment are double doors and all 2.8 metres high – sort of like a smaller version of those palaces you get in Europe."
The apartment was bought last year for just over $4m. Photo / Supplied
He said he had bought the apartment, which has an RV of $4.16m, as a home for his art collection. "So we ended up buying the [Oriental Bay] property as our home for about 11 months, and now we've decided that someone else needs it more than we do," he said.
While $6.25m would be a record for Wellington, it falls short of $38.5m house price record set in 2014 by the sprawling Auckland mansion formerly owned by property developer Mark Hotchin.
That record faces competition from another apartment, the super penthouse at the top of NZ tallest residential tower.
The two-storey 1219sqm apartment in the Pacifica, in downtown Auckland, has a fixed sale price of $42.8m.
The listing agent, Pene Milne of New Zealand Sotheby's International Realty, told OneRoof this week that buyer interest in the penthouse was strong.
She said she had received a mix of enquiries from overseas buyers, "from places like the US and Singapore, but the strongest interest to date is from people in Auckland”.
