A stylish house for sale on Waiheke Island could soon make real estate history, and become the first New Zealand home bought using Bitcoin.
The owner of 2 Kennedy Point Road, in Surfdale, has put a fixed price of $1.895 million on her home and is willing to accept payment in digital currency.
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The listing agent, Waiheke Homes' Tobias Roebuck-Ward, said the owner had lived and worked in San Francisco and owned Bitcoin investments.
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“She decided to sell the property with an asking price of $1.895 million and asked if we do crypto currencies as full or part payment," he said.
If the sale goes ahead in Bitcoin or XRP, another digital currency, it would be a first for New Zealand.
“Yesterday morning I had no idea how that works, but luckily someone in our office is really into this and has accounts himself," Roebuck-Ward told OneRoof.
“It’s the same process as transferring money from overseas bank accounts, except instead of taking days and days for each bank, it’s done in six seconds [using blockchain]. Under New Zealand real estate law, the 10% deposit has to be held in a New Zealand non-interest-bearing account, but you can exchange Bitcoin into New Zealand dollars to do that.”
The house at Kennedy Point Road is surrounded by tropical gardens, with steps down to the water. Photo / Supplied
Roebuck-Ward said the agency had already attracted interest from expats overseas, so using the digital currency was a way of engaging with a wider range of buyers.
“We have enquiries from Sydney, London, Singapore, Hong Kong. It’s really grown even in the last four weeks. About six months ago we had a buyer asking if they could make an offer with Bitcoin and the vendor thought it was a joke and said, ‘That’s a no from me.'
“But now we’ve changed. And if we’ve changed that much in just six months, imagine what the next six months will be.”
The three-bedroom split-level house on a peninsula on 813sqm has elevated sea views and steps leading down to the water, with north facing terraces, a sub-tropical garden and a bonus studio room downstairs.
Roebuck-Ward said that expat enquiries for Waiheke homes had ramped up post Covid, going from “the odd Kiwi in London” to daily enquiries. He said he had made several sales sight unseen, in Surfdale and Ostend.
London-based Kiwi expats bought a cottage at 39 Seaview Road, Ostend, for $839,000, sight unseen. Photo / Supplied
“Their parents or friends come to look, we do walk-throughs with video or Zoom, we arrange all the building reports on their behalf.
In December he sold a house at 39 Seaview Road, in Ostend, for $839,000 to a Kiwi/English couple with two children.
“They’ve now got the ball rolling to move home, and meantime the parents are using it as a bach. She’s always loved Waiheke and now she’s introducing her wife and kids to this lifestyle, that’s usually how it happens here.”
Roebuck-Ward said one of his Onetangi-based British clients still worked for his UK company, keeping office hours here from 9pm to 3am to match theirs. “But he gets to live on Waiheke.”
In Australia using cryptocurrency for real estate sales was first reported in 2018 after the first purely Bitcoin sale in 2014 in America. At that time a 1.4-acre (5665sqm) piece of land in Lake Tahoe, California – a popular holiday spot for the Silicon Valley set, just over three hours out of San Francisco - sold for US$1.6 million using 2,739 Bitcoins.
The 2019 listing of a home on Auckland's North Shore was the first in New Zealand to be offered to buyers with Bitcoin but a sale did not go ahead using the crypto-currency.
Like global currencies, Bitcoin exchange rates fluctuate over time. Today, 1 Bitcoin is worth NZ$88,165.76, but has dropped as low as $73668.57 last month and gone as high as $90,018.64 earlier this week.
Crypto-currency expert Associate Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Auckland Business School Alex Sims, says crypto-currencies are here to stay for real estate transactions.
“It's quite common overseas, there’s no problem with it. The thing you have to look at is taxation as it is treated differently. If you receive crypto-currency as payment and convert it straight away to fiat [New Zealand] currency, you’re okay. But if you hold it and it goes up, then you pay income tax on the gain. Equally, if it goes down and you convert it, you can claim it as a loss.”
She added that experienced traders usually allow a one hour transaction time to allow for six of the typically ten minute Bitcoin trading cycles, to ensure the account balance is accurate.
