- A South Island investor sold her Auckland apartment for $115,000, a quarter of its original price.
- The auction started at $15,000, with 10 investors bidding, closing after some 70 bids.
- The new owner plans to hold the property through $300,000 of remediation work, expecting a future value increase.
A South Island investor has sold her troublesome Auckland apartment for just $115,000.
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But even though that’s around a quarter of what she paid for the two-bedroom unit on Hargreaves Street, in Freemans Bay, it’s still five times more than what she had been prepared to take.
She had listed the property earlier this month with an auction reserve of $20,000.
Around 10 investors fought over the apartment in the City Sales auction room on Wednesday. The auction opened at $15,000, and closed some 70 bids later.
The apartment is rented out for $630 a week. Photo / Supplied
City Sales sales manager Scott Dunn said the vendor would be “over the moon” with the result. “We were thrilled to overachieve,” he said.
The vendor picked up the apartment in 2006 as a rental. It currently returns $630 a week but costly remediation work was due to start on the five-level apartment block in 2026.
Dunn previously told OneRoof his client did not want to pay the estimated $300,000 for the repairs or deal with the stress of the situation.
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“Talking about things that we value - one of them is money obviously, but the other is peace of mind, being able to sleep at night.”
That expense would now fall on the new owner, an Auckland investor who planned to hold onto the property while the repairs are carried out.
“He will have some bills to pay, obviously, but once they are all done with it, he should have a pretty valuable finished product.”
Dunn estimated that once the repair work was completed, the apartment could fetch between $800,000 and $900,000 in the current market.
Freemans Bay was an aspirational suburb that tended to attract lots of cool and fashionable people, he said.
The apartment block was just off College Hill, a very “fun part of town”.
“It rubs shoulders with Herne Bay, St Marys Bay, and Ponsonby. It’s like super central without being CBD,” he said.
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