A resort-style home on Hamilton's River Road has sold for $4.45 million - almost $1.5m above its RV.
OneRoof can reveal that the sale, completed in July, is the biggest this year for the city, and the third highest for Hamilton overall.
The four-bedroom luxury home had earlier sold for a higher price but the deal fell through.
Property records seen by OneRoof show the $4.75m sale, reported in May, failed to settle. OneRoof understands that the buyer never paid the deposit.
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Instead, the property was sold to a Waikato couple in an off-market deal for $4.45m in July, with the property settling earlier this month. Both sales were handled by Lugtons Real Estate.
The architecturally-designed home sits on a large 6196sqm riverfront section in Flagstaff. Impressive features include a rain-sensor LouvreTec garden room, tennis court and Queenstown schist fireplace.
A character home on Liverpool Street in Hamilton Central that belonged to former Hamilton mayor Andrew King is still the city's biggest residential sale. The property sold to developers in an off-market deal for $5.5m in March 2021.
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Hamilton's second biggest sale was of a luxury home on Lake Crescent, which traded for $4.65m at the end of 2021.
While still a rare occurrence in New Zealand, it is not unknown for property deals to fall over.
This week a man who entered a contract to buy a $1.16 million house in Manurewa was ordered by the High Court to pay $429,000 for failing to settle the purchase. The trustees successfully sued Jay Bath for not settling on the deal even though he had paid a 5% deposit.
And last month the owners of a home on Platina Street, in Remuera, sold for $875,000 less than they had been promised by another buyer 18 months earlier after the deal struck in February 2022 failed to sail.
Senior property lawyer Jonathan Wood said it is both “more common than you think, but relatively rare” for house sales to fall over both before and after the deposit for the house had been paid, adding it is an “absolute red flag” if the deposit hasn’t been made because most go through on time.
The three-bedroom bungalow on Platina Street, in Remuera, Auckland, sold for $4.125m nearly 18 months after an earlier sale of $4.9m had fallen over. Photo / Supplied
“If the deposit isn’t paid that’s when you start asking, is this purchaser for real and get your lawyer on to your lawyer and say what’s going on, why hasn’t this been paid.”
Wood said usually the real estate would quickly chase the deposit up as they usually get paid the commission from the deposit, so it is in their interest to ensure it is paid. The deposit is usually paid within five days of the signing of the sale and purchase agreement, he said.
He said the usual advice to a vendor if the purchaser had pulled out of the property deal would be to put it back on the market and sell it again.
“The reason for that is if you are able to sell it and glory be it sells for more then there’s no harm, no foul, you don’t lose anything. If you sell it for less then you look at what it’s cost you to resell, the loss that you’ve made and all those factors and go, is it now a good time to think about pursuing the failed buyers for the difference or is it an amount that makes no sense to litigate.”
Another option is for the vendor to get a court order that the buyer completes the purchase, he said, but often the reason why the deal falls over is because they can’t get finance so it’s difficult to force somebody to stump up money they don’t have.
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