- Three homes on The Rise in St Heliers are for sale, ranging from $5m to over $20m.
- Agents say selling these high-end properties depends on timing, the economy, and bank liquidity.
- Foreign buyers can purchase with the Active Investor Plus visa, but most recent sales have been to locals.
It’s Auckland’s second most expensive street – a private enclave of around a dozen or so mansions at the top of a cliff overlooking the Hauraki Gulf.
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Welcome to The Rise, where three of the street’s trophy homes are up for grabs. The most expensive has an RV of $23.5 million, while the cheapest has an asking price of just under $5m.
Properties in this slice of St Heliers rarely change hands, so to have three on the market at the same time is unusual to say the least.
8 The Rise has benefitted from an extensive renovation. Photo / Supplied
The view takes in the harbour and Rangitoto Island. Photo / Supplied
The agents involved declined to comment, but Barfoot & Thompson luxury agent Paul Neshausen, who knows the street well, said that finding a buyer for these top properties can be down to luck.
“There’s a lot of luck around timing,” he told OneRoof.
“You are very much reliant on the economy being right, there is a seasonality aspect to it and things like foreign exchange rate, liquidity of the banks and how forthcoming they are with loans, particularly the Bank of China.
“If there’s alignment, they sell. If there is not, it can take 12 months.”
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Two of the three homes – 2 The Rise and 8 The Rise – are quietly on the market, with the listing agents only showing them to qualified buyers.
2 The Rise was formerly the home of rich-lister property developer Ted Manson and his wife Maria. They sold it to the current owner in 2010 for $11m.
The 839sqm, multi-level house was designed by renowned architect Pete Bossley and sits on a 3677sqm section. OneRoof understands the owner is based overseas and that the property has largely been unoccupied.
It appeared on the open market in March this year with Wall Real Estate, but was withdrawn in June and has since swapped agencies.
Also quietly on the market is 2 The Rise, which last changed hands for $11m and has an RV of over $23m. Photo / Supplied
The house was designed by renowned architect Pete Bossley. Photo / Supplied
The Mansons had paid $5.35m for the home in 1998, following a string of high-profile owners after it was built in the 1980s for Sky TV founder Craig Heatley.
The Mansons’ three-year rebuild brought in a home theatre with ceiling lights, a courtyard that created an ethereal "mist garden" at night, a gym, sauna, steam room, games room with bar, self-contained guest apartment, along with a pool, spa, championship-sized tennis court and garaging for six cars.
8 The Rise next door is another architectural wonder. Dubbed The Concrete Penguin House, the six-bedroom Art Deco estate has a $17m RV and last changed hands in 2016 for $11m.
New Zealand Sotheby’s International Realty agents Nico Zhang and Aaron Reid are marketing the property solely to the company’s international clients.
Neither agent is permitted to comment on the property, but they did confirm that it could be bought by foreign investors with the Active Investor Plus visa.
8A The Rise has an asking price of $4.69m. The vendor is motivated to sell. Photo / Supplied
The interiors are stylish, with the listing describing the five-bedroom home as offering “effortless luxury, superb entertaining and exceptional family flexibility”. Photo / Supplied
On their listing, Zhang and Reid said their clients completed an extensive makeover of the home, which included the addition of hydronic underfloor heating, smart-home automation, six-car garaging, a wine cellar, a media room, a new kitchen with Gaggenau appliances and a huge stone island, and high-end bespoke joinery and doors by Italian brand Rimadesio.
The formal gardens with pool were done by award-winning landscape architect Suzanne Turley. “This is a residence where scale, permanence and outlook combine in extraordinary fashion,” the agents said in their advertising, noting that the views can never be built out.
Next door, at 8A The Rise, Bayleys agents Sarah Liu and Murray Wallace have a motivated vendor who is ready to meet the market.
The five-bedroom property, which has multiple living spaces, a home office, a movie room, and a pool, can be scooped up for $4.69m, just over the RV of $4.6m.
The vendor bought the home in 2010 for $2.5m and has had it on the market for over two years now.
Neshausen said high-end properties were taking a long time in the suburb and might go through three or four different agencies or agents before the planets align, and a deal gets inked.
He also said that the high hopes of huge sales when the rules changed in March to allow foreign investors to buy homes worth over $5m may be unfounded. He described the 20 sales so far reported to foreign buyers as “a drop in the ocean”.
“We are celebrating the sales. It is [20] sales that we would not have had, but in reality, those are small numbers,” he said, adding that some of those sales appearing in the data now may have been in the works for 12 months or more.
Neshausen reckons that some of these big estates, built at great expense in the 1990s, are no longer fit for modern families.
“I think if you’re spending $20m to $30m you want to move in and do nothing ... People don’t want to come in from overseas to spend $25m to buy something that needs $10m spent on it.”
New Zealand Sotheby’s International Realty Eastern Bays branch owner Greg Dennerly, who, like Neshausen, isn't involved in The Rise listings, told OneRoof that upper-end buyers know exactly what they want.
“When the right home comes up, it sells in weeks rather than months,” he said, adding that while the possibility of foreign buyers had brought “a new layer of urgency”, most of the recent big sales were to local buyers.
He said the foreigners who were looking were a mix of families, many of them American, looking to settle here with their kids or to have a berth for just a few months a year.
“They do not want to take on a project. If it is done to a high level, they will pay accordingly. Clients coming from offshore also want to buy it with all the furniture,” he said, adding that often his agents go into “white glove” mode with their overseas clients, helping them pick colours or find designers or landscapers for their new homes.
“It has got to be easy for them to go, ‘Yeah, I’ll buy it’,” Dennerly said.
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