New Zealand residential auction records were smashed when a grand house in Auckland’s Remuera sold under the hammer today for $12.8 million.
It was all over in four minutes, selling to buyers who had seen the house for the first time only the day before.
The price breaks the previous record of $12.771m for a penthouse apartment, also in Remuera, which sold under the hammer in October 2022.
The four-bedroom Arts & Crafts property, on Orakei Road, had last sold in early 2021 for $11m, but bidding in the fast-paced auction blew past that number within one minute. The house was declared on the market at $12.25m, and after four more bids – including a killer final bid that pushed up the price by $200,000 – the hammer came down.
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This is the second time Barfoot & Thompson agent Linda Galbraith, who marketed the home on 1791sqm with Cindy Yu, has set an auction record. In an auction called by Murray Smith, who also called this auction, the pair sold a stylish home in Maungakiekie Avenue, Greenlane, for $9.9m in March 2021.
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The luxuriously-finished home came with a pool and tennis court in Auckland’s prized double grammar school zone and was being sold, the agents said in their marketing, because the vendors had left New Zealand.
Galbraith told OneRoof, “I’m thrilled for the Auckland market and the positive message this sends to both buyers and vendors. And, of course, my sole objective was to break the record – twice,” she said.
“We blew the reserve apart, the sellers are ecstatic.”
The vendors of the four-bedroom home in Orakei Road, which has a pool and a tennis court, are now living overseas. Photo / Supplied
She said that the eventual buyers had only just seen the property the day before, just after arriving in Auckland.
“They were there for one and a half hours, they called all their family and asked for a variation on the settlement date as they had only literally seen it,” she said, noting that the other three bidders had also asked for longer settlement dates, and that is a common variation in high-end auctions. The sale settles in the middle of the year.
She said a dozen buyers had viewed the house over the nearly four weeks it was on the market, with one buyer making a pre-auction offer in the first day.
“He didn’t get it, there was too much competition,” Galbraith said, adding that despite some hesitation from her vendors, they allowed her to set a high reserve price.
“I said ‘I’ve got an instinct for this, you are going to break a record’ as we’d had so much interest. Some buyers initially thought it would go for less than CV [$10.2m] but I had confidence we’d get a good auction and we had a cracker.
“The vendor called me, they were so excited.”
Auctioneer Smith said the auction moved so fast that bidding passed the reserve price before he had a chance to declare the property on the market.
He can’t see why vendors, and some real estate agents, are so nervous about putting high-priced property on the market.
Four bidders competed for the Arts & Crafts property, which had a CV of $10.2m and had sold three years earlier for $11m. Photo / Supplied
“For years premium items other than real estate – thoroughbred horses, art – sell under the hammer, yet for real estate everyone gets nervous.
“When we sold Greenlane we had two bidders put their hands up, but six others in the room. The Arney Road place we sold for $8m [in 2020] had 18 bidders.
“If you’ve got really premium properties, people are fighting for them, they know the price is fair because they see it. In the auction room, there’s total transparency.”
Galbraith also sold another Remuera property in the same auction. A classic four-bedroom house on Benson Road fetched $3.2m. It too had received a pre-auction offer and had three bidders competing in the auction room. The house, billed as “deeply comfortable, retaining original charm” had a CV of $3.8m.
The result comes as Barfoot & Thompson put 274 Auckland properties under the hammer this week, along with a further 12 in Whangarei, Kerikeri and Tauranga.
Vaughan Borcovsky, Barfoot & Thompson’s operations manager, said this was the biggest number of auctions for the company since the market peaked two years ago.
He added that by the end of last year there was more certainty in the market as the new government bedded in and the Reserve Bank signalled it was not raising interest rates, which gave vendors the confidence to put their houses on the market and brought out buyers.
The sale comes as the number of high-end properties on the market for sale in New Zealand has jumped, with OneRoof listing numbers showing a 37% jump in the number of residential listings with a search price of over $5m.
Between November 1, 2023 and February 22, 2024, 300 new high-end residential listings were published on OneRoof, of which 255 are still on the market, along with another 333 top-end listings that were published before November 1, 2023.
Ray White salesperson Steve Koerber said the number of $5m-plus houses for sale in Remuera had tripled since mid-2023 when there were barely any listings. He earlier told OneRoof sellers were reluctant to put their houses on the market last year because they did not think they would get the price they thought it was worth and wanted to avoid the embarrassment of it not selling.
“So suddenly this year all that pent-up supply ... there’s a new government, there was that hint of interest rates rising and I think a lot of people in their wisdom or not have decided it’s time to push the button.
“It’s like delay, procrastinate and then bang, a bunch of people have decided now is the time so that’s how we come to this point of more listings in that range than we would have expected.”
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- Additional reporting Nikki Preston
