By Tom Carey
A young couple successfully bought a Glen Iris house in post-auction negotiations on Saturday for $3.31 million.
The pair beat two buyers for the keys to 10 Grandview Avenue. The underbidders at the auction were local downsizers.
The vendors had lived in the 10-year-old Metricon house for three years. Belle Property Glen Iris director and auctioneer Steve Burke said they had plans to upsize following the sale.
The price guide for the property was $3 to $3.3 million. Bidding opened with a genuine bid at the bottom of the range, but Burke said buyers were reluctant at the opening of the auction. Burke said a vendor bid was placed at $3.05 million in response to the hesitancy.
After a sequence of genuine $10,000 bids, the auction was paused at $3.2 million. Burke refused to accept $5000 bids from the eventual purchaser at this stage.
“The reason being, we weren’t on the market,” he said. “I didn’t want the auction to go on forever and also get caught at the wrong sort of level.”
After the break and further bidding, the auction was passed in at $3.29 million. A final sale price was successfully agreed between the buyers and vendors in negotiations.
It was one of 823 auctions scheduled in Melbourne on Saturday. By evening, Domain Group recorded a preliminary auction clearance rate of 63.1 per cent from 561 reported results, while 73 auctions were withdrawn. Withdrawn auctions are counted as unsold properties when calculating the clearance rate.
In Essendon, a generational family house was sold under the hammer at auction for $1.9 million to a developer. The auction sale cleared the vendor’s reserve price by $200,000.
The vendor listed the house at 39 Warner Street that their grandparents built themselves in the 1950s. Nelson Alexander Essendon partner and auctioneer Ryan Currie said that the house was still in a liveable condition after some extensions.
The successful developer beat two families and another developer at the auction.
“They [the buyers] identified that it is a rare spot to have the last house next to a park. It was a dead-end street, so a non-thoroughfare street,” said Currie about the appeal of the property.
“But it was a fairly rare offering in the market given it is quite slim pickings out there for listings,” he said.
Bidding opened with two vendor’s bids at $1.55 and $1.6 million. The first vendor bid was at the bottom of the price guide of $1.55 to $1.7 million. The first genuine bid was at $1.62 million.
Currie declared the house on the market at $1.7 million, which led to a flurry of bids between $20,000 to $1000 until it reached $1.9 million.
Currie said that the developer who bought the property knew the area well and planned to develop two luxury homes.
In Bentleigh, a family member who planned to live near relatives bought a new three-bedroom townhouse at auction on Saturday for $1.71 million.
Bidding for the property at 19 Blair Street opened at $1.5 million. Two buyers competed at the auction, while one registered buyer did not participate.
The price guide was $1.45 to $1.55 million. Jellis Craig Bentleigh Kosta Mesaritis director and auctioneer said that the auction raced past the top of the price guide, which was also the vendor’s reserve price.
“He gave me autonomy to say at the top end of the range, if there’s competition, we pop it on the market,” Mesaritis said.
The property was one of three townhouses developed at the original address of 43 Nicholson Street by Jabbour Building Group.
One of the other townhouses, a four-bedroom property at the original address, was sold at auction last week for $1,855,000.
Mesaritis said the underbidders from the auction at 19 Blair Street had placed an offer for the third townhouse, which was yet to be put on the market.
The townhouse at 19 Blair Street is zoned to McKinnon Secondary College.
AMP chief economist Dr Shane Oliver said that the Melbourne property market was currently in a messy state.
“People are worried about what’s going to happen with interest rates, and that’s holding back demand,” he said.
“[Interest rates are] keeping buyers at bay and obviously also runs the risk that it could drive a pickup in distressed sales going forward.”
There were 823 listings in Melbourne this weekend – the highest number since Easter.
“It looks like demand is a bit constrained and that’s why you’re seeing these softer readings for the clearance rate,” Oliver said.