Brisbane house prices: New Farm home equals Brisbane residential auction record

One of New Farm’s most prized riverfront holdings has sold for a staggering $7.75 million, making it equal to Brisbane’s most expensive auction on record.

Set on a spacious 873-square-metre block, the property at 39 Griffith Street with rare uninterrupted access to the Brisbane River became the only property to match a record auction result set a decade ago, when a grand riverfront estate at 22 Sandford Street, St Lucia sold under the hammer for the same price.

39 Griffith Street is understood to have been purchased by Queensland rich-lister Kevin Seymour, after his grandson was spotted at the auction bidding on his behalf.

More than 100 people piled onto the pool deck as eight registered bidders fought it out for a chance to secure the unique house.

Auctioneer Haesley Cush, of Ray White New Farm, said he always knew the auction was going to be monumental.

“As I was preparing to go down there, there was a real element of excitement,” he said.  “I felt really great, and really quite proud and privileged, to be able to go down and do it.

“We had owners that wanted to sell, and they were clear about that all the way through. We had buyers that were pre-registered, who had capacity at any level to buy the property.

“So, that’s a pretty good formula, when you’ve got both sides of the fence wanting to do a deal.”

Bidding for the multi-level home opened at $4 million, then very quickly jumped in lots of $500,000 up to $6.5 million.

At that point the bidding slowed, with the price eventually making its way to $7 million.

After negotiations, the house was put on the market and reportedly snapped up by Kevin Seymour for $7,750,000.

The Seymour family are no strangers to buying up the best of New Farm’s riverfront land — only two days before Christmas 2016, three of Kevin Seymour’s grandchildren paid $17.35 million for 2388 square metre of riverfront land on Oxlade Drive.

Ray White New Farm principal Matt Lancashire said there had been huge interest in the property throughout its five-week campaign.

“We had a lot of interstate and international inquiries,” he said. “We had inquiries coming from New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, and also a London purchaser. Heaps from Melbourne and Sydney, too.”

Nicholas Given, of Ray White New Farm, said he was surprised by the demographics of the people interested in the property.

“There was a mix between developers, who were looking at it as a development site to potentially knock over and go up five stories, and owner occupiers,” he said. “But in the end, we had more interest from owner-occupiers.

“When we started it, I thought we would get more interest from developers. There were just more people wanting it as a house, because it’s an incredible riverside house.”

This is one of the many reasons Lancashire believes the auction’s result bodes well for Brisbane’s prestige market.

“This is a great sign of things to come,” he said. “In Brisbane they used to consider anything over $2 million [as] prestige. Now it’s gone up, and the bar’s been raised. $5 million has become the new $2 million.

“A really buoyant part of the market is that $5-10 million [range]. And there has been a number of $10 million sales happen in Brisbane, and I think there’s going to be a number of them happening again this year.”

In particular, he said it demonstrated the increased desirability of New Farm as a suburb.

“I think that [desirability is] driven by the lifestyle attributes,” he said. “Literally, the whole of New Farm you can access walking straight through along river boardwalks or over the cliffs into the CBD.

“It’s the first inner-city suburb which has got the most amenities. Everyone wants to be there. It’s an eclectic mix of people.”

Lancashire said this desirability has led to great interest in the area from interstate buyers, particularly from Melbourne and Sydney.

“The first places they tend to look are New Farm, Newstead [and] Teneriffe, because they’re the only suburbs that can really go pound for pound with some of those suburbs down south,” he said.

“Brisbane is relatively affordable compared to down there. It can be almost half the price for what you’re paying for the same thing.”

Despite this upturn, Lancashire said some people had expressed concern about the 39 Griffith Street property going to auction in the first place.

“We had a bit of feedback from people saying, ‘Auctions [aren’t] going to work for this type of property, finance is really difficult, people are not going to get themselves into a position to bid, people in this price point are private’,” he said. “And, it was actually quite the opposite.

“People in this price point were actually quite refreshed that it was an auction, so they [could] determine the value of the property without it being behind closed doors.

“To have eight registered bidders on that property, [with] that price point, is a really good sign of what’s to come in the next couple of years in Brisbane.”

An earlier version of this story suggested the New Farm property had broken Brisbane’s record auction price. In fact, it equalled the record set in 2009 by the St Lucia property.