What a flip: Uninhabitable villa makes almost $2m in profit in less than a year

An uninhabitable villa in Auckland’ double grammar zone has made almost $2 million in less than a year.

The six-bedroom house on Pah Road, Epsom, sold at Barfoot and Thompson’s auction this week for $5.9m.

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The vendor had bought it in August 2020 for just over $4m, and while they did nothing to improve the house itself they got resource consent to build seven townhouses on the 1088sqm site and had sorted drainage.

The listing agent, Barfoot and Thompson’s Cici Wang, described the sale as “quick and easy”, with two developers fighting it out to secure the property.

Wang said the big selling point was that all the difficult groundwork had been completed, adding that the vendor would have easily spent a couple of hundred thousand dollars preparing the property for a town house development. “Big money but they’ve been rewarded with even bigger money now,” she said.

“The buyer can start building right away.”

The listing for the property called on buyers to demolish the exiting house, which made up just $250,000 of the $2.925m CV.

Wang added: “The market is going crazy. I’m selling so much land with development potential and I was thinking it already reached the highest price but no, it just keeps exceeding my expectations.”

Another property with development potential, in neighbouring Remuera, sold for $4.3m at auction this week.

The 1098sqm site on Chatfield Place sits on a 1098sqm site zoned mixed housing suburban and had a CV of $3.9m, $100,000 of which was for the 1960s-build four-bedroom house.

And on the city’s North Shore, in Mairangi Bay, a 1960s home located on an 809sqm site zoned mixed housing suburban sold under the hammer for $2.375m.