'Free' villa in New Zealand to be demolished after relocation option fails

It was free to a good home but a historic villa will now be demolished after no-one took up the opportunity to relocate it.

The house in Nelson, on New Zealand’s South Island will come down this week to make way for eight multimillion-dollar townhouses.

Property developer John McLaughlan said he listed the house at 317 Hardy St for free a few months ago. He had two people interested in it but “it had all been too difficult to move it”.

It was going to cost about $150,000 to move the building, “then you’ve got all the other costs on top of that”.

“You could be looking down the thick end of double that,” plus the cost of a property to put it on.

“One lady did a lot of research on moving it, and she spent quite a lot of money,” but in the end, it wasn’t viable, he said.

McLaughlan said the building, which no longer looked like it did more than 100 years ago, had asbestos that was being removed this week.

It had been “messed around with inside” with rooms added and was “a bit of a rabbit warren”.

The house had been vacant for the past year but was previously mainly used as a commercial building for doctors.

McLaughlan said he would have “loved to have seen someone lift it off and take it away”, but instead the old building would live on in its fittings and joinery being sold on Facebook Marketplace.

“What is valuable will be sold off before demolition to interested parties.”

He planned to put one of the chandeliers into the townhouse he and his partner, Debbie Malthus were moving into for “posterity”.

The eight townhouses priced at $1,550,000 each (about $A1.46m), were due to start being built early next year, each with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two car parks, a lift and roof terrace. The property backs onto the Nelson police station site.

McLaughlan said four of the townhouses had sold mainly to retirees who were downsizing. One or two more needed to be sold to enable building to commence.

Meanwhile, two other sets of townhouses are under construction in the city – three 144 square metre townhouses, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms and two carparks, on Halifax St; and four apartments on Ajax Avenue overlooking the Maitai River.

Bayleys real estate agent Gill Ireland said a couple of the Halifax St homes, priced between $1.1m and $1.3m (about $A1.04m and $A1.23m), were under negotiation and three of the riverfront townhouses had sold; one to local retirees and two to couples moving to Nelson from out of town.

This article first appeared in Stuff.co.nz