The fast sale of a three-bedroom house in the prized Auckland suburb of Remuera suggests that FOMO (fear of missing out) is on its way back, said Ray White agent Ben Ryken.
OneRoof wrote about Ryken’s listing on Wimbledon Way last week. The property had been on the market for several months with no deal in sight when Ryken relaunched it with a declared reserve of $950,000.
The new approach resulted in a bustling open home on Sunday and a sale on Tuesday.
“There were more shoes at the door than I can remember in a long time – just a line of people,” Ryken told OneRoof.
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The house, which backs onto a park, was picked up by first-time buyers, whose unconditional offer was high enough for the overseas owners to cancel their plans to sell at auction.
Ryken was unable to disclose the exact sale price but said it was above the $950,000 reserve but less than $1 million.
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When the house was first listed, it had been priced around the $1.1m mark, and while there had been serious offers they had all fallen through.
Ryken said the owners had “had enough and gone, ‘Hey, what do I have to do to get it sold?’.
“In Remuera, anything that’s three bedrooms for under $1m is a bit of a bargain, so we thought why not put it under $950,000 and see what happens from there,” the agent told OneRoof last week.
Ryken said he had nearly 40 groups through Sunday’s open home and more than 10,000 views on OneRoof.co.nz.
He thought the shortened timeframe motivated people to check the house out immediately rather than waiting for the next weekend to venture out.
“We had a lot more new interest and I suppose there’s just renewed activity in the last couple of weeks with the interest rates dropping, and I think buyers are going ‘Well, we’ve got to do something now or we might miss the boat’.
The house attracted a lot of buyer attention at the weekend. Photo / Supplied
“I think first-home buyers had bad experiences in the boom. I think they want to buy now before they have to compete again.
“There’s a lot more confidence to enter the market knowing what the interest rates could be in a year or two years,” Ryken said.
The buyers of Wimbledon Way were renting nearby and saw the house as an opportunity to purchase in a good location and add value over time.
The house needed some work, such as painting and new carpets, but this wasn’t something some buyers were up for.
“A lot of first home-buyers can’t see past that sometimes, which is why [they] buy new builds because they are all shiny and new and easy.”
While the sellers could potentially have received more if they had waited for the auction, they did not want to play the odds, he said.
“The fact that we had an unconditional offer above our declared reserve was good enough for them.”
Being quick to act, as these buyers had been, would be the key to securing property in the short to long-term future, Ryken said.
That came down to buyers being prepared with mortgage brokers and lawyers lined up, and sellers of properties languishing perhaps coming up with a declared reserve strategy, which put a line in the sand on price.
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