A weather-beaten three-bedroom villa with no off-street parking sold under the hammer yesterday for $2.23 million – more than $500,000 above its 2017 rating valuation.
A developer snapped up the house at 17 Harcourt Street, in Grey Lynn, Auckland, after strong competition from other developers making bids at the Barfoot and Thompson auction.
READ MORE: Find out if your suburb is rising or falling
The listing agents, Calvin Roche and Shilpi Thakur, had encouraged buyers to bring their “ideas, architect, and builders” and hyped the home as having “tremendous” value-add potential.
Start your property search
Unlike other recent sales of tired or rundown Auckland villas, 17 Harcourt Street is zoned Residential Single House under the Unitary Plan, meaning the buyer can only renovate or extend the existing dwelling and can’t demolish and put up townhouses or units on the 471sqm section.
The house was one of 53 lots auctioned by Barfoot and Thompson yesterday and follows a record-breaking month for Auckland’s biggest real estate agency.
Barfoot and Thompson managing director Peter Thompson told OneRoof yesterday that the company had had its biggest January in 17 years, selling 1086 houses at an average price of $1.068 million.
“What made such a high turnover possible was the extraordinarily high level of new listings for the month. At 1378, it was the highest in a January for eight years,” he said.
“Even during the height of the last property cycle we never came close to selling this many homes in a January."
Thompson was not surprised by the surge, even though January is generally a quiet period for the housing market.
“We expected January to be busy this year because no one could travel. During Christmas people tend to go overseas and because a significant part of the population stayed in Auckland, that’s where the activity came through.”
He said that although January's average price was down 2.2 percent on December's, it was not an indication that prices had peaked.
“The average price invariably dips between January and December given the absence of many high-end buyers from the market over the holiday season, and it is not until March that high-end property sales again start to have a greater influence on sales data.
“In January we sold 72 homes for in excess of $2 million. While this is high for a January, in the last three months of last year we sold more than 100 homes in this price category each month."
Some of the biggest growth had been in some of Auckland’s most affordable suburbs, including Flatbush and Westgate, where new developments were coming on stream.
3 Cambie Avenue, in Red Beach, Auckland, sold for $800,000 at auction. Photo / Supplied
“The builders can’t keep up with the demand for sales and every time you drive out that way you see new blocks of houses going up,” he said.
He said a lot people in the Auckland market were targeting new builds as a way to save money and time.
“It’s saving them the hassle of getting council consents and trying to find a builder to renovate a kitchen and build a fourth bedroom. It's easier sometimes to see what else is out there,” he said.
One such new build, a two-storey terrace house at 3 Cambie Avenue, in Red Beach, sold at auction yesterday for $800,000 while a modern four-bedroom home at 3 Vittoria Terrace, in Flat Bush, sold for $1.346 million on Tuesday.
However, do-ups, such as 17 Harcourt Street, were still proving popular with investors and first home buyers looking for capital gain.
