The Auckland enclave of Herne Bay has seen real estate prices slide 4.5% over the past year, although the median entry point into the country’s most expensive suburb still resides at close to $3 million.
There was a similar slowdown in prices achieved at next door’s St Mary’s Bay, which now sit at a median of $2.86m, according to latest data from Cotality.
It's a different story in Parnell, however, where house prices have nosedived 6% to a median of $2.3m over the past 12 months, the property analytics firm says.
In fact, prices are generally softer across most of Auckland's posher suburbs, with median prices hovering around the $2m level in Kohimarama, St Heliers, and Glendowie.
That’s about $1m off the pace set by the suburbs at the southern end of the harbour bridge.
511 Riddell, sold to an offshore buyer.
Flashes of life
Still, there are flashes of life in those eastern reaches. Glendowie’s high-end waterfront Riddell Road – home to Graeme Hart’s $38m clifftop mansion – recently saw the sale of a nearby, sprawling five-bedroom home for $9m to a Singaporean buyer. The home was listed as being previously owned by Yifei Sheng, linked to Jack Ma’s Alibaba online retail empire.
And this week, Sotheby's confirmed the sale of former NBR publisher Barry Colman and his wife Kati’s $18m-plus mansion at 511-513 Riddell to an unnamed offshore buyer.
The 577-square-metre historic home has six bedrooms and seven bathrooms on a 2449 sqm section, also boasting a heated indoor swimming pool and a lift.
The deal was transacted under New Zealand’s Active Investor Plus or 'golden visa' scheme, which only kicked in on March 6 and allows investors to buy or build a home of $5m or more.
Sotheby’s realtor Pene Milne, who helped broker the sale, said it was one of the country’s first transactions to proceed under the AIP and had taken “exactly” five working days for the Overseas Investment Office to sign off on the deal.
Milne has also now listed a waterside property at 17 Lansdowne Street at Bayswater, owned by the Sullivan family. The house has an estimated value of $4.8m, but the realtor is clearly expecting the sale price to be above that, noting that while the home “may be marketed as suitable for overseas purchasers”, they remain subject to overseas investment laws.
36 Oxford Terrace, Devonport.
One of Cheltenham’s best
At potentially double that price is 36 Oxford Terrace in Devonport, a four-bedroom character home on Cheltenham Beach, which could fetch about $8.4m.
The home – purchased by Dorothy Chignell and her late husband Jack in 1967 for £20,000 – was modernised in 2000 and sits on 1234 sqm of beachfront land.
Linda Simmons, at Bayleys, said the quarter acre was possibly one of Cheltenham’s best beachfront sites and it had attracted positive interest from both local and offshore buyers. She was currently in negotiation with a local buyer for the property, after the tender process closed on March 18.
She said while the realtor hadn't transacted any AIP deals yet, there was "firm overseas interest" and more buyers from the Middle East were now also popping up in the wake of the Iranian conflict.
There are some buying constraints, with latest realestate.co.nz listings showing 83 new residential listings above $5m since March 1, of which 64 are in Auckland.
A dozen of those are above the $10m level – eight in Auckland and two in Queenstown-Lakes – with the listing firm noting there are only about 140 properties in that price category at any one time.
Cotality’s Kelvin Davidson.
No boom times
Cotality chief property economist Kelvin Davidson said the housing market is positioned for “modest” value growth through 2026, although the general election, debt-to-income lending restrictions, and global economic risks would remain important factors to watch.
Affordability has also improved compared with the peak of the market, he said, while mortgage rates have stabilised and listings appear to be easing slightly.
“Those factors should support some gradual value growth this year, but buyers and sellers remain cautious, so the prospect of a boom looks unlikely.”
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