A modern Christchurch home with impressive sea and city views has sold for $3.72m - almost double what its owners paid for it two years ago.
It is also the second most expensive house to sell in Christchurch so far this year and dwarfs any other sale in the suburb by more than $1m.
The luxury five-bedroom, three-bathroom home on Marama Crescent in Mt Pleasant sold under the hammer at a Bayleys auction this week after strong competition from five bidders.
The property, which has an RV of $1.67m, last changed hands in March 2020 for $1.95m, meaning the vednors walked away with a profit of $1.77m, on paper at least.
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New analysis of house-flipping in New Zealand, by OneRoof's data partner Valocity, identified 1584 Canterbury properties that were bought and resold in the two years to April 2022, up from 1114 on the two years to the end of April 2020.
The average gain from Canterbury resales post-Covid was $168,881, up from $87,372 in the two years pre-Covid.
Bayleys agent Steve Ellis, who marketed the Marama Crescent home, said the $3.72m sale price was a “phenomenal result”.
“It just shows what can still happen if you’ve got a lovely property, well-presented and create competition,” he said, adding that the owners were only selling due to a change in circumstances not because they were flipping the home.
The Marama Crescent home last sold two years ago for just under $2m. Photo / Supplied
They had spent several hundred thousand dollars on the property since buying it two years ago, installing a high-quality outdoor area with a gas fire, built-in BBQ and electric louvres. They had also completely re-landscaped and redecorated inside. “They just enhanced the house very cleverly and just made it a very, very attractive home,” Ellis said.
Ellis noted that economic headwinds had affected the higher-end of the market much less than the rest of the market. The new owners were local buyers who had been looking for the perfect property for some time and had been competing against another group who had opted to buy instead of build in the current climate.
Bayleys Christchurch general manager Rachel Dovey added: “These kind of properties don’t come up every day and it took the eye of those five groups, which was fairly significant.”
While the people who bid on the Mt Pleasant property were locals, the agency was still seeing a lot of people relocating from some of the other bigger cities such as Auckland because Christchurch was seen as a good value place to live.
Harcourts Grenadier managing director Andy Freeman said Mt Pleasant was a “cool” part of Christchurch and there weren’t many houses for sale there at any one time. Properties there often had amazing views too.
Christchurch's most expensive property so far this year is a home in Leinster Road, Merivale, that sold for $4m. Photo / Supplied
Freeman said the price often depended on both the area and the specific property as not all areas are going up in value at the moment. Some people are also moving towards buying newish homes rather than building themselves due to the higher cost and delays involved.
“To go and replace something on the hill would cost you are fortune if it’s quite new because of the way the building costs are.” In this market, it would likely take four years from buying a section to actually moving into the house, he said.
The most expensive property to sell in the city last year was a five-bedroom home on Wairarapa Terrace that sold off-market for $8m, followed by an award-winning waterfront house on Desmond Street that sold for $6.7m.
This year the sales have been slightly lower with a property on Leinster Road in Merivale holding the record so far at $4m.
Find more properties for sale in Mt Pleasant here.
