A family paid $9.3 million for a stylish Greenwich house at auction on Saturday, beating four other registered parties.
Four bidders participated in the auction of 14 George Street, which had five bedrooms, a waterfront reserve location and a price guide of $8.8 million.
It was one of 1004 auctions scheduled in Sydney on Saturday. By evening, Domain Group recorded a preliminary auction clearance rate of 66.3 per cent from 572 reported results, while 130 auctions were withdrawn. Withdrawn auctions are counted as unsold properties when calculating the clearance rate.
Bidding began at $8.5 million and the price rose in increments ranging from $100,000 down to $5000, Belle Property Lane Cove selling agent James Bennett said. A mixture of families with younger children and teenagers were interested in the home.
The winners were a family from the north shore.
Bennett said the home’s appeal was due to its high-quality build with double brick walls and a concrete slab, given it would be challenging to build something similar now due to rising building costs.
He highlighted its premium position with water views and close to the ferry.
There were only two houses for sale in Greenwich as of Saturday – including this auction – he noted, something he had never seen in mid-September as the busy spring selling season kicks off.
“At this time of year that is unheard of,” he said. “Greenwich is a tightly held place, once you get in … lack of choice means people don’t move.”
The median house price in Greenwich is $4.17 million as of the June quarter, Domain data shows.
In East Killara, a renovated family home sold for $2,711,000 at auction.
Four parties registered to bid for the five-bedroom house at 14 Redfield Road. Three were young families looking to upsize and one was a developer, and all made bids, Ray White Upper North Shore selling agent Jessica Cao said.
Bidding began at $2.4 million, the home’s guide price in its campaign.
Cao said bidding was pretty quick, and the price soon passed the $2.6 million reserve. It sold to a young family.
Cao said the appeal of the home was that it was fully renovated and no work was to be done by the new owner.
She added that the market had been busy coming into spring.
“It is pretty active, lots of stock on the market, but the buyers are pretty [active] as well,” she said.
“Certainly, there are buyers talking about a potential drop [in interest rates] since the US dropped half a per cent,” she said, referring to the US Federal Reserve’s official interest rate cut last week to a range of 4.75 per cent to 5 per cent.
In Earlwood, an unliveable fixer-upper or development opportunity sold for $1,036,000.
Eight buyers registered of whom four actively bid for the two-bedroom house at 42 Stone Street, set on 174 square metres of land.
Bidding began at $750,000, then rose in $20,000 increments. McGrath Leichhardt selling agent Alexandra Stamatiou-Buda said the reserve was $900,000.
She thought the new owners were planning to renovate or possibly do a new build, and so was the underbidder.
She said the entry-level price point was a drawcard, and potential buyers were taking into account the volume of work required to update the home and make it liveable.
The seller had inherited the property, which had been in their family for 80 years, and was delighted with the result.
“Some properties are performing better than others; you can’t pick it,” she said.
“There’s some good buyers. Anyone who has finance at the moment is a good buyer.”
Earlwood’s median house price is $2.05 million, up 19.5 per cent over the past year.
Ray White chief economist Nerida Conisbee said the average number of active bidders had edged down in September from August as more homes were listed for sale this spring.
“There’s been a lot of property available, there’s been a lot of choice for buyers, so that kind of spreads the number of bidders out a little bit more,” she said.
“But it’s still holding pretty steady. We haven’t seen a huge drop-off despite the number of properties becoming available.”
She said Sydney prices were showing signs of stabilisation, making it a good market for buyers, while hopes were high that interest rates had peaked and were likely to fall later this year or early next.