Put $100 million into the search engine of any residential real estate website in New Zealand and you’ll likely come up blank. New Zealand just doesn’t have houses at that price point.
Even searches for houses priced $20m or more will return a small handful of homes. If you do have this kind of money to spend, you may have to arm wrestle an unwilling owner into selling because at this price point properties are rarely let go.
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But in countries like the United Kingdom, United States, Hong Kong, or even Australia, you can take your pick of luxury properties with eye-watering price tags.
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A trawl of real estate websites shows a multitude of “super prime” homes that are for sale at prices which make $100m seem modest and $20m a steal.
Sotheby’s in France, for example, lists a luxury nine-bedroom villa with 12 bathrooms with a sale price of €120m ($200m).
This luxury property is inspired by the architecture of Byzantium and Venice and has a lake, a tennis court, woodlands and views of Cannes and the Mediterranean.
In Hong Kong, you can buy a property called The Peak for more than $110m. This six-bedroom, four-bathroom mansion is at a highly prestigious address on top of the island and has views stretching across the city to the iconic Victoria Harbour.
Situated in the exclusive Hamptons, in the US, this newly built six-bedroom home has a guide price of US$49.5m (NZ$69m). Photo / Supplied
Over in London you can find any number of magnificent properties, including Hampton Hall in Queens Drive, which is on offer for more than $55m and features more than 70 rooms including staff accommodation, internal and external leisure facilities and a two-storey garage.
A recent report by global real estate agency Knight Frank found that 201 homes in London - together worth more than $5.3 billion - were snapped up by the super rich last year, up 3% on the year before. In Hong Kong, sales of homes worth more than US$10m numbered 169 last year, while in Sydney there were 55 sales of super-prime properties, up from 46 in 2019.
Last year, Australia recorded its first nine-figure sale price for an apartment and the highest price ever paid for a residential property. The top three floors of Tower 1 in the exclusive One Sydney Harbour development sold for $150m-plus and Fairwater, a significant heritage house in Point Piper, an exclusive seaside suburb in eastern Sydney, sold to a tech billionaire for more than $100m.
This house in the super wealthy Sydney suburb of Vaucluse has seven bedrooms, three kitchens, two internal lifts and a 20-car garage. It has a guide price of A$60m (NZ$64m). Photo / Supplied
New Zealand, it seems, has a long way to go to catch up to the luxury residential market overseas. That’s not to say we won’t ever have a $100m sale but it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
However, Knight Frank’s latest Wealth Report does single out a couple of New Zealand suburbs as neighbourhoods to watch. Alongside the likes of NoMad in New York, Super Cannes in the Cote d’Azur in France and Forum in Barcelona is humble Beachlands, 40 minutes from Auckland’s CBD and a short distance from Maraetai Beach.
Beachlands is emerging as a favoured location with those seeking more space and a commute via the regular ferry service into the CBD, says the report, which explains the suburb is primed for growth with 90% of the residential stock built in the last decade.
The report highlights the beach and the blue water, and points out that just $1m will buy a large, luxurious detached house with four to five bathrooms, a decent sized garden and close enough to the beach that you can leave the car at home.
By comparison, higher-end condos in NoMad, north of Madison Square, in New York, range from $20m to more than $30m.
Papamoa in Tauranga also features in the report, which says $900,000 will buy a modest beachside home on a flat section around 10 minutes’ walk from the beach.
While luxurious real estate is always going to attract the world’s wealthiest people, luxury residences are not the only thing those with really deep pockets are spending up large on – on the other side of the world people are also buying hotels and football clubs.
The Guardian newspaper in the UK recently reported that last year wealthy individuals went on “an unprecedented buying spree, snapping up trophy UK assets including the Ritz hotel, Charlton Athletic football club and the 170-year-old suit-maker Moss Bros – purchases worth almost a billion pounds”.
High net worth individuals (individuals with assets of more than US$30m) led 27 private buyout deals worth a combined £958m and the value of UK buyout deals by these multimillionaires increased by 626% compared with 2019, reports the paper.
