- Remuera leads Auckland with 104 mansions worth over $5m each, dominating the city’s luxury market.
- The suburb’s appeal is boosted by top schools and recent changes to foreign buyer rules.
- High-end buyers are active, but deals are slow, with some waiting for prices to drop.
Auckland’s Remuera is the city’s premier address for mansions, new OneRoof-Valocity research confirms.
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The leafy city suburb has 104 trophy homes worth more than $5 million each and large enough to qualify as a bona fide mansion. That’s almost a third of the city’s overall tally of mansions.
No other Auckland suburb comes close to rivalling the suburb’s dominance in prestige real estate.
Coatesville, on the city’s northern lifestyle fringe, has the next highest number of mansions, at 31, followed by Herne Bay (26), Orakei (23), and Waiheke Island (21).
The research coincides with a surge in overseas interest in New Zealand’s housing market, fuelled by recent changes to foreign buyer rules under the Government’s Active Investor Plus programme, also known as the “golden visa”.
The OneRoof-Valocity research identified just under 20,000 properties in Auckland that were over 328sqm in size (the biggest 5% of homes in the region). Of those, just under 2% – 338 – had a house or improvement value of over $5m, denoting a luxury finish attractive to buyers at the top end.
The average RV of the 338 homes that met the "mansion" criteria was $14.8m, with the combined RV coming in at just over $5 billion.
The city’s most expensive mansion is the imposing 2568sqm home that failed financier Mark Hotchin built on Huriaro Place and Paritai Drive, in Orakei. That property was sold to wealthy Chinese businessman Stone Shi for $38.5m in 2013 and now has an RV of $72.5m.
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The research found that the majority of Remuera's mansions were clustered around five streets: Victoria Avenue (21), Arney Road (19), Remuera Road (12), Burwood Crescent (7) and Arney Crescent (7).
Wealthy buyers, both local and international, have been active on these streets in recent months. A four-bedroom, 548sqm home on Victoria Avenue was recently sold for over $10m in a deal brokered by Bayleys’ Gary Wallace, while an Arney Road mansion that had been upgraded twice by noted architect Brent Hulena was sold by Bayleys agent Edward Pack for over $8m.
Pack is also reported to have got circa $40m for a mansion estate on Arney Road mid-last year.
With an RV of over $70m, the former Hotchin mansion on Paritai Drive is Auckland’s most expensive home. Photo / Fiona Goodall
334 Victoria Avenue, a trophy home on the waterfront, is on the market with an RV of $9.3m. Photo / Supplied
At 97 Victoria Avenue is a four-bedroom landmark residence with an RV of $12m. Photo / Supplied
Those looking to buy a Remuera mansion have more than a few options, with OneRoof counting 36 mansions on the market for sale now, six of which are on Victoria Avenue.
These include 334 Victoria Avenue, a waterside trophy home built by acclaimed architect Vernon Brown and listed for sale with an RV of $9.3m; and 97 Victoria Avenue, a 519sqm prestige residence with an RV of $12m, a full tennis court and an outdoor pool all on 1966sqm of land.
The total value of the three most expensive Remuera homes on the market right now is over $70m – seventy times the average price of an Auckland home. They are:
- 532 Remuera Road: a five-bedroom, 987sqm house built 110-years ago by the most famous architect of the time, Roy Binney. It comes with a pool, a tennis court, a garden pavilion, a tennis pavilion and gym, seven bathrooms and garaging for eight cars, and still features the original ballroom. Price: $32m.
Looking for $32m is the historic home at 532 Remuera Road. Photo / Supplied
107 Arney Road, which last sold five years ago for $22m, is up for grabs. Photo / Supplied
272 Remuera Road is a six-bedroom concrete and glass mansion designed by Craig Moller Architects that’s looking for more than $20m. Photo / Supplied
- 107 Arney Road: a six-bedroom, 650sqm concrete and glass mansion with serious architectural cred. It was designed by Ron Sang in 1973 and updated by Fearon Hay in 2007 (work which won a supreme award from the New Zealand Institute of Architects). The 650sqm house last changed hands for $22m in a private deal five years ago. Price: $20m-plus.
- 272 Remuera Road: another six-bedroom concrete and glass mansion, this time designed by Craig Moller Architects. Moller, whose firm Moller Architects is best known for its work on the Sky Tower, started on the house in 2002 and didn't finish until 2005. He describes his creation as “encapsulating the idea of the large, gracious houses that populate the Remuera ridge in a modern and contemporary manner”. Price: $20m-plus.
Terry King, the director of The Kings of Real Estate and the listing agent for 532 Remuera Road, said not all $5m-plus properties in Remuera were equal. “There’s so much difference between $5m and $10m and $15m and $20m.”
He was optimistic that the top-end of the market was returning to its natural state, citing his recent sale of a classic but updated seven-bedroom house on Seaview Road. “It has been bought by someone local, doing what has traditionally made the Remuera market strong in good times: moving from one house in Remuera to the next one in Remuera. That’s what we want happening; that’s the best sign that the market is starting to come back.”
He said the key appeal of Remuera was its access to good schools (much of it is in the prized double grammar zone and is home to two of the country’s leading preps). “If you don’t have children at school in Remuera, then it’s not a suburb you would automatically choose to live in. It’s not a beachside suburb,” he said.
Bayleys agent Sarah Liu said the number of high-end properties on the market now was much higher than the same period last year, with vendors hoping to appeal to AIP investors. “I have golden visa buyers around me, always looking for property. But not just in Remuera,” she said.
Bayleys agent Sarah Liu says some of her buyers have $30m to spend. Photo / Fiona Goodall
“They’re still in the process of getting the visa. They know they will get it, so they just come here to look at property. If they see something they like, they just say ‘Maybe I will come back later, maybe two months, three months later ... if it is still available, I will move forward’.”
She said her buyers, some with up to $30m to spend, were time-poor but were also very picky. “Although we have some [homes] on the market that are very beautiful, have a luxury finish, and a good view, but maybe in their eyes they are not suitable.”
Barfoot & Thompson agent Leila MacDonald agreed that buyers were slow to put pen to paper on a deal. Many were also spreading their search beyond Remuera to the eastern bays, even to Takapuna (where there are 11 mansions, according to the OneRoof-Valocity research).
“A lot of them say ‘Oh well, we don’t have to be really in the grammar zone because our kids go to private’,” she said, adding that most of her clients had budgets of between $5m and $8m.
MacDonald said that while there were plenty of empty-nesters ready to quit their big family homes, new buyers were not up for buying a house that needed work. “Anything 10 to 12 years old, they call them old. That’s not modern enough for them. They will do it up if they get the price right. It won’t be less than a million dollars.”
Barfoot & Thompson agent Leila MacDonald: “Anything 10 to 12 years old, they call them old. That’s not modern enough for them." Photo / Fiona Goodall
Vendors were still confident that new buyers were coming into Remuera and ready to list. But Macdonald said while her office had been fielding enquiries from buyers from America, England and Switzerland, many of them had not decided where in New Zealand they wanted to buy. Deals were not happening quickly, with some buyers waiting for prices to drop more – mistakenly, in MacDonald’s opinion. “The vendors are not in a hurry to sell, and the purchasers are taking all the time in the world.”
New Zealand Sotheby’s International Realty’s Remuera managing director Jonathan Sissons said that a lot of the suburb’s upper end stock indicated the return of normal housing lifecycle, with owners wanting to trade down to smaller places now that their kids have left home.
“They’ve got a lot of money tied up in their home, and they want to enjoy their retirement and invest that money into shares where they’re getting an income,” Sissons said, adding that a lot of vendors had held off on that move for the past couple of years, hoping that prices would pick up after the post-Covid drop.
“Now they’re realising they just have to get on with life. They’re buying and selling in the same market, so they’ve come to terms with it. The market has been educated.”
The right property sells quickly, he said, pointing to a renovated four-bedroom home on Bassett Road that had four offers and sold within a week of going on the market earlier this month. “They are pretty shrewd buyers.
“They do see the value, and they do understand the quality in this market. They know what good fixtures and fittings are, they understand the difference between a solid oak floor and a laminate.”
Sissons said that while some vendors would like agents to quietly find buyers for their house, they are usually looking for a “dream” price, and that’s unlikely to happen. “I just see those as unmotivated sellers. The people who are motivated are in a campaign, they spend money getting their houses ready. And buyers are looking for someone who is serious about selling, because they don’t want to waste their time and they don’t want to pay over market value.”
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