City Sales Sells Downtown Auckland Apartment for $20,000

Undoubtedly, you will have read last month of the downtown Auckland apartment with waterfront views that sold for $20,000, and realised that you had to read it again to make sure you weren’t ‘seeing things’. So was this the bargain of the century? Well, City Sales had earlier advertised the apartment as "vacant and abandoned" and "Aussie owner wants it gone".

City Sales advertised that it was not an apartment for the faint-hearted but, “risk takers could be handsomely rewarded." The apartment was also only for sale as a leasehold, with an annual ground rent of $6745 and a special levy of $5228.

A further $4417 per year would be charged for Operating Expenses along with $1575 in annual rates. Further complicating matters is that the building does not have a traditional body corporate management structure, meaning its owners have limited power.

Many of the owners were also foreign owners, like the seller of the apartment at yesterday's auction."We're told it's like trying to herd cats to get agreement on things; there is a fight going on over the new ground rent and, believe it or not, we have had a series of Australasian owners stunned when we explain to them their investments are leasehold," City Sales’ Martin Dunn said. "Australians don't know what leasehold is."

Dunn said the Aussie owner of the apartment that sold yesterday had simply had enough. "This vendor fortunately was a very wealthy Melbourne doctor, currently on a yacht off Genoa and he was so fatigued with it all he just said dump it," Dunn said.

The new buyer, on the other hand, already owned an apartment in the building and so had "weighed the risk pretty knowledgeably". Dunn said City Sales refused to sell any of the apartments off the plans when they were brand new because the company "could see a fiasco developing". "[However], we are expert at reselling complex situations like this," he said.

City Sales has been an active part of the Auckland CBD and apartment market since its beginnings, and are practiced in everything to do with this market, so for more information on apartments for sale Auckland city, rental property management and real estate agents Auckland please go to http://www.citysales.co.nz .