Crescents are streets ahead for home owners
It must be rather pleasant to live in a crescent in inner Auckland.
That’s because houses on crescents in the old Auckland City Council district typically cost more than those on avenues, drives, streets, places, roads or lanes.
There were 5717 homes on inner city crescents — in suburbs ranging from Remuera and St Heliers to Westmere — new data by analysts OneRoof-Valocity showed.
And in the past year 216 sold at a median sales price of $1.14 million.
Homes on avenues had the next highest sales price at $1.05m, then drives at $1m, roads at $986,000, lanes at $935,000, streets at $830,000 and places at $775,000.
Ollie Wall, who sells luxury homes at Graham Wall Real Estate, said Remuera’s prestigious Burwood Cres was a good example of why crescents could offer extra value.
It has less traffic because it isn’t a through road and curls around a clifftop allowing more homes to share in the waterfront views.
“We’ve sold four homes each worth more than $10m on Burwood Cres in the last three years,” Wall said.
According to Wall, the city’s most prestigious street wasn’t even a crescent — it was Paritai Drive in Orakei.
Part of the mystique that built around such addresses was their history. Wall was currently fielding a raft of inquiries from successful Kiwi expats returning home from Hong Kong and New York.
While there might be fancier homes in Westmere for instance, many of the returnees were fixated on buying on Paritai Drive because living there had been a goal since they were kids.
Outside of inner Auckland and the North Shore, most real estate agents said it often made little difference whether a home was on a crescent, drive or road.
Cool street names seem to matter more judging by the likes of Mansion Ct, Seacrest Drive, Picasso Drive and Lagoon Way. And modern developments such as Millwater have taken it even further with roads also described as greens, rises, terraces, parkways and tracks.
Mike Pero real estate franchisee Grayson Furniss said roads ending in courts tended to be cul-de-sacs popular with families, while parades were on the water’s edge and terraces tended to be raised roads with views.
Because Millwater was a new development that hadn’t yet translated into higher prices on courts, parades and terraces.