- European buyers purchased a Glendowie home sight unseen for $3.4m through an agent.
- The buyers hold residency visas and are relocating with three daughters, making school zones crucial.
- Five overseas purchases were approved last month, bringing golden-visa purchases above $5m to 25.
A European couple who have never set foot in New Zealand bought their dream home in Auckland’s Glendowie in June for more than $3 million.
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The buyers, who have residency visas, snapped up the four-bedroom new-build home on sought-after Riddell Road with the help of buyer’s agent Alex Martelli.
“For overseas clients, we take lots of videos, and provide them with plenty of intel from our own knowledge of the local area,” she told OneRoof. “They don’t have to stress.”
Martelli’s buyers were relocating to New Zealand with their three teenage daughters, so school zones were vital.
“The trust is exceptionally high. And I have a belief in my team. I always go, ‘If it was your money, would you buy this home yourself?’
“You are not just buying them a house. This is their first point of contact in New Zealand, which is a new culture, new climate, new lifestyle. It’s new everything.”
The Riddell Road property had been on the market since 2023. Photo / Supplied
Martelli Buyers Agents founder Alex Martelli: “For overseas clients, we take lots of videos, and provide them with plenty of intel from our own knowledge of the local area.” Photo / Supplied
The Riddell Road home had been on the market since 2023 with various agencies, and was priced to sell when Martelli’s buyers swooped in. They paid $3.4m, just below the $3.495m asking price and more than $1.3m below the RV.
Listing agents Myles and Peter Cleave, from Bayleys, had disclosed in their marketing that the vendor was prepared to take less than the build cost.
Martelli said a lot of her work involved narrowing down potential properties, many of which are not openly listed on the market, to a focused handful to show clients. One client’s list started at over 40 properties. Another saw just one house, said it was perfect, and the deal was done in three days.
Some wealthy buyers like Martelli to front for them because they want to keep their identities private. “We’ve worked with a few American buyers recently, who say, ‘I’ve got an American accent. I don’t want agents to go, ‘These guys don’t understand the market’.”
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Bringing a dose of reality to buyers’ wish-lists is part of her job. “We have a fiduciary duty to the buyer. You have to have a reality check and say, ‘Look, I understand what you want to buy, but that’s not actually achievable’. And those are tough conversations.”
Martelli often works with locals as well. Some are too busy to search themselves; others don’t know enough about a new area to understand prices and values, while others call her in for final negotiations once they’ve found a place.
“I had a chap call me - he’s a CEO of a very large firm. He goes, ‘Alex, I’m awesome at business negotiation ... but I actually don’t know how to negotiate property because it’s not my area of expertise. If I don’t know the market and the values, how do I negotiate this?’.”
Prices for the over 80 homes Martelli’s team has bought for clients range from $800,000 to over $10m. “If you’re a first-time buyer and you’ve worked your bottom off for years to save up, then that deposit is really important,” she said.
Some vendors prefer to market their homes only to international buyers, foregoing local markets. This luxurious Hamptons-style spread on 45 View Road, in Auckland’s Campbells Bay, has a $32.5m price tag. Photo / Supplied
“When they are wealthier, [they] say, ‘I don’t want to be ripped off because I’m wealthy’. I’ll be damned if I’m going to be taken for a ride’.”
She said buyers in the current market were particularly fearful of overpaying. Foreign buyers particularly struggled with the lack of asking prices in New Zealand.
She has learned that sometimes pricing can be arbitrary.
In London, where she worked as a buyer’s agent, houses were rejected because the garage wasn’t large enough to fit the Mercedes Maybach or the Phantom Rolls-Royce. Car parking can also be a problem in Auckland.
“There was a house in Parnell we were looking at, and the Porsche and the Ferrari would scrape [getting into the garage].”
Newly released data shows the government approved five property purchases by overseas investors in the last month, including three in Queenstown-Lakes, one in Auckland and one in Southland.
This brings the total number of $5m-plus property purchases by “golden visa” holders to 25 since the foreign investment rules were changed at the start of March.
Bayleys chief executive Mark Macky told OneRoof that his salespeople worked with offshore clients through local buyer agents and through Bayleys’ global partner, Knight Frank.
“Knight Frank is the dominant player at the top end of the market and has an extensive private office that deals with the family offices of [wealthy people],” he said.
“We’re on regular calls with those guys, sharing listings, sharing properties, sharing buyers.”
Mark Harris, managing director of New Zealand Sotheby’s International Realty, said that sometimes his agents here act as buyer’s agents, particularly for high-end clients referred by the company’s Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York offices.
“In the US, they work both sides over there; they have buyer agents and listing agents. It’s something we’re exploring here as well in New Zealand,” he said.
Harris noted that some New Zealand vendors preferred to list their properties exclusively on the overseas market, not locally.
“They feel like possibly the purchaser is more likely to be an international ... but also there’s sometimes a level of discretion that they would like as well,” he said.
NZ Sotheby’s agent Malcolm Low is currently marketing one such listing to overseas buyers: a Hamptons-style five-bedroom, four-bathroom home on 45 View Road, Campbells Bay, on Auckland’s North Shore.
The contemporary coastal home, which is listed on luxury accommodation sites for $15,000 a night, has an asking price of US$19.045m (NZ$32.5m).
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