After dropping by as much as 15% during the slump, prices in the trendy Auckland inner-city suburb of Grey Lynn are inching their way back to market peak, with some vendors scoring big sale prices.
A stylishly renovated five-bedroom villa on Dickens Street sold earlier this month for $4.725m – more than $2m what the vendors paid for it in 2020 – and a three-bedroom villa on Rose Road sold for $3.8m, nearly double what the vendors paid in 2018.
Ray White Grey Lynn co-owner Scott Wither, the listing agent for Rose Road, said that the market, while not back to full strength, was looking much improved post-Easter.
“Most people are of the view that interest rates have topped out,” he said.
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Wither said the past 90 days of sales for his office would give potential sellers confidence.
“In our own market, Grey Lynn, basically any property that we’ve taken to market in the first quarter that was an auction campaign, 95% of those have sold within that window. It doesn’t mean they were all sold under the hammer, but they were sold, which is pretty incredible,” he said.
This is the first time since the market peak that he has seen this.
“The snapshot this year has definitely been better than it was last year. But I go one step further and say it is better post-Easter than it was at the beginning of the year,” he told OneRoof.
The Dickens Street property had had a thorough makeover. The listing agent told OneRoof buyers are responding to quality renovations. Photo / Supplied
A renovated villa on Rose Road, in Grey Lynn, also scored big money at auction this month. Photo / Supplied
“I think that this comes down to people largely taking the signs out there, or the messaging from the Reserve Bank that things have hopefully topped out.”
He did note some lingering hesitation in the market, however.
“There are definitely some people who will be more conservative about how they’re purchasing, who need some certainty about what their own home is worth before they can work out what they have got to spend on the next step.”
Ray White Grey Lynn agent Kane Taylor said buyers were responding to quality renovation work, with properties like Dickens Street, which he brought to market with colleague Scott Bartlett, doing extremely well.
Taylor said that when the owners of Dickens Street bought it in 2020 it was in a “pretty bad” state.
“The whole house was virtually rebuilt. They lifted it up, dug underneath and excavated a garage, pushed the back out. When I was appraising it, there were only a few houses like that that had been rebuilt and sold in the last two years.”
Taylor said over 100 groups looked at the house, knowing that the house would sell at auction for “well over” $4m. Four buyers registered for the auction, he said, with three of them actively bidding.
A three-bedroom villa on Millais Street, in Grey Lynn, Auckland, sold for $2.31m this month. The buyers were looking to take on a renovation project. Photo / Supplied
He said that while there was a lot of property on the market in Grey Lynn around the $2m mark, higher-priced properties were facing less competition. Buyers, he said, were prepared to pay for well-done work. “They’re not going to take a rough job,” he said.
Taylor said those buyers intending to pick up a do-up were fussy. “They are looking at size and if the house itself has got good orientation, a good aspect, off-street parking,” he said.
He pointed to the sale of a house on Millais Street, which recently fetched $2.31m under the hammer. The vendors had bought it in 2021 with the intention of renovating it “but they didn’t quite get there”.
“The buyers were looking for a do-up, but only a nice villa in a nice area, and they’re pretty comfortable in the world of [building] prices and time frames and all of that.”
Taylor told OneRoof his team had written sales of around $13.5m in seven days, including the sale of two other houses in neighbouring Westmere: one a smartly modernised four-bedroom bungalow with a pool on Cumberland Avenue and the other an off-market deal for a four-bedroom unrenovated bungalow on Faulder Avenue.
Taylor said another Westmere property the pair have listed at 23 William Denny Avenue was attracting a mix of families to the renovated four-bedroom 1940s house and developers keen on the suburban density zoning of the 942sqm site. It has a CV of $4.05m, and last sold nine years ago for $2.205m.
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