The owners of multi-million dollar Auckland home swapped it for another house in the same neighbourhood during the Level 4 lockdown, OneRoof can reveal.
The couple, who do not wish to be named, exchanged their four-bedroom house in Parnell to avoid the pain of selling and finding another property.
The deal, which also included some cash, was brokered by Ray White Remuera agent Andrew Fava and is a revival of a real estate practice more commonly seen during the GFC.
Ray White Remuera owner Megan Jaffe told OneRoof this was the first such trade her agents had carried out during the coronavirus and she expects it won't be the last either.
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Jaffe says she carried out many such property deals during the Global Financial Crisis, adding that often a luxury car or yacht would be thrown in to seal the deal. “There’d be a beautiful home with cars in the garage and the cars would stay," she says.
The owners of 89 St Stephens Ave had placed it on the market prior to the lockdown. They had been renting it out and wanted to reinvest some of the money from the sale in another property, but the Covid-19 crisis upended their plans.
However, when Fava told them of a couple who were very interested in the house their ears pricked up. “Andrew said, ‘They’re really keen but with Covid-19 they’re nervous because they have to sell their house.' We just said, ‘Well, what’s their house like because when we sell we want to buy something.’," they told OneRoof.
The couple, who once traded a beach house in Orewa for a piece of land, added: “Had Andrew not been the agent I don’t think the deal would have been done. The other house was a property we’d never seen.”
Fava says the new owners of the four-bed house are happy, too, and the swap solved headaches for both parties. "All of a sudden, it just came down to a cash difference and what that figure was,” he says.
Jaffe added: “It’s creative win-win for both the buyer and the seller. The great thing was we had lots of time so we went very, very slowly going through all the layers of what was important to both parties and what their needs were.
“To me, it’s just good, old-fashioned real estate. During the GFC, I used to do trades with beach houses, boats, cars - all kinds of things would be thrown in.
“First and foremost you need a platform of trust, and you need to have experience and skills to do it. A lot of people don’t do it because it takes so much time.
“They’d rather take a property to auction and have the market do the work, the momentum of the market, but we don’t have momentum of the market right now so our job is to create momentum and to put energy where energy needs to go.
“This was all purely able to be done because Andrew Fava had a great relationship with his seller and a great relationship with his buyer so full credit to him because you can’t do it if you haven’t built trust.”
