By Jim Malo
Keen first home buyers dropped a big, knock-out bid before buying a Maidstone townhouse for $700,000 in a brief yet competitive auction on Saturday.
The two-bedroom home at 3/3 Montgomery Street has a separate study downstairs, an outdoors living area and upstairs bedrooms.
Barry Plant agent and auctioneer Anthony Molinaro said buyers liked those features, which were difficult to find in one property.
“They’re definitely around, but to have all three of those [features] … Yeah, it is very rare,” he said.
Molinaro listed the home for sale with a quoted price range of $600,000 to $660,000. Two bidders competed and were both first home buyers, he said.
The first bid of $675,000 was some $15,000 more than the top of the range. The buyers traded just four bids before the home sold to the opening bidders. The sale price was the reserve.
Anthony Molinaro auctions the 3 Montgomery Street townhouse.Credit: Simon Schluter
“What we’re seeing is this end of the market for first home buyers is still very, very strong,” Molinaro said. “It’s often cheaper to buy these at the moment than it is to rent them, you know, if you can get away with putting down a 5 per cent deposit, it makes complete sense.”
The townhouse was the vendors’ first home. “They’re wanting to upsize,” Molinaro said. “They’re stoked in there.”
It was one of 117 auctions scheduled for Saturday, a much quieter auction weekend due to the AFL grand final. By evening, Domain Group recorded a preliminary auction clearance rate of 64.6 per cent from 65 reported results, while 11 auctions were withdrawn. Withdrawn auctions are counted as unsold properties when calculating the clearance rate.
In Reservoir, two developers arrived late to the auction for a deceased estate, but were still keen to compete to buy the home.
The two-bedroom house at 191 Spring Street was unlivable, Ray White Preston’s Ian Dempsey said, but was attractive for its development potential.
“It was in very bad disrepair,” he said. “There was danger tape in the back room because the stumps had gone. It was pretty much land value.”
Dempsey listed the home for sale with a quoted price range of $690,000 to $750,000. Before the developers arrived, the agents skipped the auction and went straight to negotiations with the sole buyer who arrived on time and had interest below the home’s reserve price of $700,000.
“Both bidders rocked up a little bit late, we were just negotiating and then there were two at a similar level so we said let’s just call the auction,” Dempsey said.
“We opened it up at $680,000 on a live bid. It got down to $1000 bids right up to $720,000.” The house sold at that price.
The bidders saw development potential in the 651 square metre block. “It’s in the Preston high school zone, and it’s a corner block so you can get multiple units on their own title,” Dempsey said.
Later, a Brunswick East townhouse sold in a Zoom auction in another contest between first home buyers.
The three-bedroom home at 12 Ivory Way was nearby the 96 tram line and popular CERES precinct in Merri Creek. Nelson Alexander Brunswick’s agent and auctioneer Robert Enes listed the home for sale with a quoted price range of $950,000 to $1 million.
“The vendors, to their credit, did an amazing job to get the home well presented for sale,” he said. The investment property had been updated with cosmetic renovations, Enes said.
“That’s what the market wants today, The buyers in the market today don’t want to spend a dollar turning properties around, so that really helped.”
One of the two bidders placed a pre-auction offer of $1.02 million on Thursday, which the vendors were prepared to accept, but it was challenged by another buyer. Enes said he would have held the auction on Zoom on Friday if it weren’t for the public holiday.
The auction began at $1.02 million, the property’s new reserve, and two parties traded about two dozen bids in mostly $5000 increments.
The home sold to the buyer who made the pre-auction offer for $1,125,000, which was $105,000 more than the reserve price.
“The auction was quick, we had two genuine buyers who had been in the market for a little while,” Enes said. “The buyer mentioned he’d looked at about 80 homes.”