First-home buyers getting huge discounts on ‘nana and grandpa’ houses

Lucky buyers are snapping up Auckland homes that haven't been on the market for more than 30 years at prices that wouldn't have been achievable a year and a half ago.

Many are securing seven-figure “price discounts”, with many of the “nana and grandpa” selling under the hammer for well below CV.

One first-home buyer recently secured a five-bedroom "do-up" home on Ngatiawa Street, in One Tree Hill, for at $1.355 million - more than $1m below the property's $2.425m council valuation.

Barfoot & Thompson agent Sara Knight, who marketed the property with colleague Anna Stephens-Brown, said the cottage-style house had been owned by the same family for more than 50 years. She said the sloping section and the total do-up house didn’t attract a lot of buyers through open homes but such houses were still coming to the market, as people still had genuine reasons to sell.

And while engineers and a property developer had passed on the house, the buyers were first-home buyers who were trying to get a foot-hold in the area. The house is zoned for Remuera Intermediate, as well as local One Tree Hill College, and close to Cornwall Park.

Bidding started at $1m before the hammer came down on the house at $1.355m. Two back-up buyers with conditional offers missed out, Knight told OneRoof.

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“There was a lot of work with buyer and seller, they met in the middle,” Knight said.

Agents said sellers of properties that have been in a family for decades are typically not caught up in market cycles and have genuine reasons for selling.

A three-bedroom home on Lochiel Road, in Remuera, Auckland, sold under the hammer for $1.162m. Buyers had been told to ignore the $1.425m CV. Photo / Supplied

“It’s a hotspot in a cold market,” said Ray White Remuera agent Steve Koerber, who with wife Nila, brought a 1973 three-bedroom townhouse in Lochiel Road, Remuera to auction this week on behalf of a “careful owner”, who had kept her original décor.

The advertising for the house told buyers to disregard the CV of $1,425,000 and they did, with eight bidders, five of them actively bidding. The terrace house sold under the hammer for $1.162m, as the two final bidders upped their bids in $1000 lots “brick by brick” as auctioneer John Bowring joked.

The message that the tidy property was a “100% definite sale” brought huge interest from first-home buyers, investors and downsizers looking for their last do-up project, Koerber said. The buyers are a young family wanting to get into the school zone, and prepared to do some updating.

“I also think CVs on these untouched houses assume that the house is more modern than it is, their calculations assume some renovations in the intervening 50 years.”

A four-bedroom English-style 1930s house on a cross-lease section on Mount Albert Road, on the market for the first time in 31 years, fetched $941,000 this week, in a close-fought auction between two bidders, with some of the later bids in lots of just $500. The price, at $179,000 below its CV, reflected that the house needed work, said the Barfoot & Thompson agent, Gill Macdonald, who marketed the house.

Macdonald said these properties appealed to first home buyers.

A four-bedroom house on a cross-lease site on Mount Albert Road, on the market for the first time in 31 years, sold for $941,000. Photo / Supplied

“They wouldn’t be able to buy a renovated property, so people are always interested in the houses that have been tightly held, it looks like a good opportunity,” she said, adding that the under-bidder was a first-home buyer, but the house went to an older couple who plan to renovate.

Also selling for under CV this month was a nearly original 1940s ex-State house on Mamaku Street, Meadowbank, which fetched $1.235m – $715,000 less than its CV – at auction.

Barfoot & Thompson agent Anna Lechtchinski said in her marketing ad that such "one careful owner" homes on a full site didn't often come to market. The 612sqm property with views of the rolling paddocks of the nearby reserve, is zoned for urban density, and is in Meadowbank Primary, Remuera Intermediate, and Selwyn College zones.

Last week, another three-bedroom family home on a leafy 790sqm section in Mount Albert, on the market for the first time in 65 years, also sold for $1.475m, well below its CV of $2.2m.

In Westmere, in Auckland's popular inner city, a four-bedroom house at 111 Garnet Road, on the market for the first time in 31 years, attracted 34 groups through open homes, said Barfoot & Thompson agent Daragh Manning, who marketed the English-style 1940s cottage with Sheba Soundhar.

The house passed in at auction, but Manning said buyers would be aware of a similar three-bedroom bungalow on nearby Cumberland Street that sold ahead of its auction at the beginning of the month for $2.2m, $250,000 below its CV.

“Westmere is a popular suburb, we see lots of local families wanting to step up from a two to three bedroom. The issue is that most of them have a property to sell, so there is quite a lot of conditional interest,” Manning said.

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