Family splashes $6.15m on house with viewing window for prestige cars
A family with children in local schools paid $450,000 over reserve at auction on Saturday for a showpiece, double-storey Strathfield estate with a viewing window for prestige cars.
Auctioneer Tom Panos dropped the hammer at $6.15 million at 8 Palmer Avenue, which also has a glass atrium foyer, swimming pool and a home cinema, against a reserve of $5.7 million.
The buyers beat another family who were hoping to gain entry to the prestige area.
The property was one of 1145 scheduled to go to auction in Sydney this week. By Saturday evening, Domain Group had recorded a preliminary auction clearance rate of 68 per cent from 738 reported results throughout the week, while 160 auctions were withdrawn. Withdrawn auctions are counted as unsold properties when calculating the clearance rate.
Bidding opened at $5 million and flowed in increments of $100,000, running at a fast clip.
Bidding was confident and purposeful, given a lack of stock and the upmarket attributes of the home, agent James Kaye of Belle Property said.
The buyers inspected the house six times before auction day, Kaye said.
“The vendor built it to live in for himself,” Kaye said. “Families knew if they did not buy it now, there would not be another one like it, and they may be waiting six to 12 months.”
Elsewhere, a frenzied finish to an outer north-west auction has delivered a brick house and granny flat into the hands of a bullish buyer.
An eccentric final bid of $1111 by an investor, in response to another bamboozling bid, was enough to silence the competition at the Marayong auction.
The pair of properties at 11 and 11A Junee Street sold for $1,154,444, after a battle that consisted of five investors.
The configuration of the home and granny flat was unique, agent Sam Yazdi of Ray White said, being side-by-side and of a similar size.
Both have two bedrooms and one bathroom, and are tenanted, with a combined weekly income of $900.
After an opening bid of $950,000, it took only three more snappy bids to leap over the $1.09 million reserve.
The underbidder threw up a helter-skelter sum of $1,153,333, hoping to wrap it up, but that was topped by the final bid of $1,111 to take it to the final price.
Yazdi says the odd bidding was designed to throw off relentless competition.
“The winner of the auction said, ‘OK, if he does that, I’ll match the energy’,” Yazdi said. “It was a bit of fun and an attempt to put the others off and make them think.
“We did expect it to sell at that level because it was a very good setup and has attracted a high rental yield, with good tenants. But we were surprised how quickly the auction went up to that level.”
Another homeowner in Strathfield drove 10 minutes south to Belfield to secure a dream home site for $2.06 million.
“It was a land opportunity,” Ray White’s Jessy Antaky said.
The auction of 29 Clarence Street drew 10 registered bidders and six threw their hands in the air.
The buyer, who paid just north of the $1.9 million reserve, will rent out the property for now, with the view to knock it down and build a new family home later, Antaky said.
“The auctioneer was taking bids left, right and centre,” he said. “It slowed at about $2 million, and then the last moments were a grind.”
Antaky said all but one of the bidders were families, and Belfield draws buyers from neighbouring Strathfield for its comparative affordability.
The vendors owned the character house, with a vintage, salmon-pink kitchen, for 40 years.
Westpac senior economist Matthew Hassan said Sydney’s 68 per cent clearance rate is above the long-range average for the city, but the market remains tentative.
“It is positive in the sense that January and the first half of February was really thin trading, and so the clearance rate can be flattened by seasonality,” he said. “I think this is a clearer signal that conditions are solid but still not spectacular.
“If we were expecting a big, positive result to rate cuts, we’d be having clearance rates well into the 70s.”
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