A luxury Italian-style mansion on Auckland’s North Shore is looking for renters with over $6000 a week to spend.
The five-bedroom house on Paremoremo Drive, Lucas Heights, on the fringe of Albany, is asking $6250 a week. For that price, tenants get a very private 7.23 hectares of grounds and gardens, a pool and jacuzzi that comes with staff to keep them manicured and pristine, and views of the Te Wharau Creek estuary and the North Shore Golf Club.
But that is not the top price for a rental in the city.
OneRoof found another North Shore beachfront property on Minnehaha Avenue, in Takapuna, asking $8000 a week. The four-bedroom house with a gourmet kitchen is also being advertised at a daily rate of $2000 as a location for television commercial and photo shoots.
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OneRoof records show the 297sqm house sold at the end of November 2022 for $7.225 million and had been listed again for sale last winter but does not appear to have sold.
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Another elegant house on Arney Road, Remuera, that was also listed for sale last year and has not found a buyer yet is also looking for tenants. The five-bedroom mansion, which at one point was looking to sell around $15m, is now advertised to rent at $7000 a week.
The Waikato-based owners had earlier told OneRoof they had rented out the house after they bought it in 2021 for $13.5m but never moved in. It had undergone a significant refurbishment before going back on the market.
The average Auckland rent, according to Barfoot & Thompson figures released last month, was $662 a week – up 5.2% year-on-year.
The Italian-style mansion on Paremoremo Road in the North Shore’s Lucas Heights sold in 2021 for $5.35m. Photo / Supplied
The rental property has a pool, jacuzzi, billiards room and five bedrooms - and staff to take care of the grounds. Photo / Supplied
Another property, a mansion on Remuera Road that made the record books for the suburb when it sold in 2018 for $25.5m, was also on the market last year looking for $6000 a week. It was recently rented to host a glamorous party for a trendy liquor brand that featured heavily in social media.
Graham Wall, of Wall Real Estate, who brokered the deal to Chinese buyers, said that wealthy overseas owners have local property managers who want to make sure some of the costs of maintaining the property are covered.
While he couldn’t speak about the owners of individual properties, James Lowe, managing director of Lowe Property Services, said that even if buyers were holding onto a property for capital gain, renting it out covered its running costs.
“A lot of people don’t realise with these massive houses is that they need to be lived in, otherwise they start to fall apart – the toilets, the mechanicals.
“You have these ghost houses, but if they haven’t been lived in for a year, you’d spend half a million [dollars] just to get it back to where it was before because nothing’s been used.
He added that while many of the tenants at this level could afford to buy the house, some chose to rent in the short-term, perhaps while their children were in local schools.
“It puzzles me sometimes, but if you think about it in terms of just a straight cost, in order to buy one of these houses the mortgage would be double the price of the rent at least. They’ve already got a couple of other houses, so they just rent somewhere in the meantime.”
Lowe said that tenants were a mix of local families and internationals on transfer, with most renting for a year or more.
The five-bedroom Remuera Road mansion, which sold to overseas buyers in 2018 for a then record price of $25.5m, was asking $6000 a week last year. Photo / Supplied
The five-bedroom Arney Road mansion, which last sold for $13.5m, is back on the rental market asking $7000. Photo / Supplied
Max Thomson, managing director of Alba Property Management, the luxury rental company that is letting the Lucas Heights property, said the $6250 price point was relatively rare, even in the high-end market, with maybe half a dozen such properties coming up in a year.
He said the company lets some of their clients’ properties on a mix of short-term through Airbnb and Bookings.com and to longer-term tenants.
“It depends what is going to make the most sense for the owners. Sometimes we might do a nine-month long tenancy then during the summer periods we switch it to Airbnb so the owner can block out to use themselves,” he said.
“Our average rental is about $3000 a week. The target market for this sort of place is an executive coming in from overseas, their company is relocating them, funding the accommodation for six or 12 months.
“Or it might be someone having extensive renovations done [to their home], it’s usually the insurance company paying for the majority.”
OneRoof records show the property sold three years ago for $5.35m and now has a CV of $6.25m.
The owner, a businessman who asked not to be named, told OneRoof he bought the property during Covid after living in Hong Kong for over 20 years. He said he reluctantly moved his family back to that city recently.
The four-bedroom house on Minnehaha Avenue, on Takapuna beach, is asking $8000 a week rent or $2000 as a location site for filming and photoshoots. Photo / Supplied
“It was a difficult decision as we know we could not live in the same type of dream house [in Hong Kong]. We decided to consider renting the main house to the appropriate individual who will understand its interior and exterior beauty,” he said.
The opulently decorated house, built in 2000, features an atrium with handcrafted curved walls and a fountain, a gourmet kitchen and butler’s pantry, four bathrooms, a home cinema, library, office, and billiard room. A space currently used as a children’s games room and gym could be used as a separate guest apartment, Thomson said.
It comes with underfloor heating, custom-made joinery, imported chandeliers, a speaker system, five fireplaces. For security, there is an infrared CCTV cameras, automated gates, an alarm system, and the property comes with its own water bore.
“This property is truly a dream come true for anyone looking for the ultimate luxury lifestyle,” says Thomson.
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