Auction Heat: Double Grammar zone home sells $4m above CV
Strong bidding drives price of large family home a whopping $4m above its CV, writes CATHERINE SMITH.
Arenovated fivebedroom villa in Auckland’s double Grammar school zone sold at auction this week for
$7.66 million – more than $4m above its CV.
The house on Pukenui Road, Epsom, ticked all the boxes for buyers with big budgets, according to the listing agents, Barfoot & Thompson’s Livia Li and Alan Guo.
More than 65 groups viewed the property, which has a pool, guest house and a sprawling 1363sqm of grounds.
Barfoot & Thompson city branch manager Sandra Forrester said: “It was very much the traditional villa, with big grounds. This is blue chip Epsom, and these types of homes just don’t come up very often – people are getting very frustrated.”
The house, which last sold in 2018 for $5.2m, went on the market at $6.7m, after bidding kicked off at $6.2m.
“It came down to three people still bidding over $7m but there were four or five people bidding past $6m,” Forrester said.
She said that the seller had owned the house for only two and a half years, but had been overseas for most of that time and unable to return to New Zealand.
Seven of the eight bidders had variations on their auction registration for a long settlement, as they all had properties to sell if they were the successful buyer.
“People aren’t jumping out of their current homes, they’re sitting waiting until they find the perfect house, they won’t sell until they’ve got the right one. They don’t want to [sell and] be left without in a rising market.
“Bidding went so fast the auctioneer barely got a chance to say the house was on the market. There’s not a lot of property I go ‘wow’ at, but this was one.
“It is really shows us there is strong interest for property of this calibre above $6m in good areas. Everyone was surprised at what happened. No-one could have predicted that price.”
Barfoot & Thompson auctioneer Murray Smith said
“People aren’t jumping out of their current homes, they’re sitting waiting until they find the perfect house.”
that bidding just kept “going and going” after the property was on the market.
“This should open the door for more people at the top end to come to auction. These days if owners auctioned, they’d do well. And it’s better for buyers than a multi-offer situation, where if you’d known the competing offers you might have kept going.”
The $7.66m price doesn’t topple New Zealand’s residential auction record set in March when Smith brought the hammer down on a $9.9m bid for a luxury house in neighbouring Greenlane.
Two other Barfoot & Thompson auction sales this week showed the heat in the market: a modern five-bedroom house in Epsom that went for just over $4m and a do-up in Mount Eden that went for nearly $3m, both listed with Sara Knight.
Knight said the Epsom property’s plaster construction limited its appeal, but the address was one of the suburb’s best. Three bidders drove the price well above its 2017 CV of $3.65m.
The do-up villa on Essex Road, Mount Eden, really drew in the buyers. The house, split into a two-bedroom and a onebedroom flat, attracted over 110 groups through open homes and eight bidders. The hammer came down at $2.83m, a comfortable $705,000 above its $2.125m CV.
“It is on a 566sqm site, so there were almost no developers, even though it is zoned for density. A lot of people wanting to turn it back into a single home, including the buyer,” Knight said.
The house’s location, within walking distance of Mount Eden village meant, there was “heaps of potential” for a really cool renovation, she added.