Photo: 123RF
It's been a patchy year for the property market.
Prices have been flat or slightly down in many parts of the country through 2025, although Southland has returned to its post-pandemic price highs, and Queenstown remains an outlier.
Real Estate Institute data shows that both the most expensive house sale of the year and the cheapest are in Auckland, where the market is more sluggish than most of the rest of the country.
64 Sentinel Road, Herne Bay, in central Auckland, sold in September for $35 million. It has five or six bedrooms over 800 square metres and 4000 square metres of land, with the harbour on three sides of the section. The property includes its own helipad and hangar. From the pool, you could look out over the water to the North Shore.
The property was designed by Fearon Hay Architects and is largely glass, with private beach access.
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At the other end of the spectrum, an apartment in the Scene Three block at 30 Beach Road, in Auckland's central city, sold in March for $15,000.
It has two bedrooms, one bathroom, access to a pool and tennis court as well as carparks. But the property is a leasehold, which means owners have to pay an ongoing ground rent, which has the potential to increase sharply at review.
The lease of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei's downtown Auckland land at the former Railway Lands, Te Tōangaroa, came up for review in August.
Owners of two-bedroom apartments had been paying about $25,000 a year but there were [. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/524360/apartment-owners-may-have-heads-in-the-sand-about-ground-rent-increase warnings it could double].
Other units in the block have sold at similar prices.
Infometrics chief executive Brad Olsen said the two sales offered some interesting insights.
"I think I saw some numbers that suggested the $35 million was roughly in line with the government value that that property had had, which probably reinforces that over time Auckland house prices haven't sort of moved all that much in the last wee while. They have tracked sideways and that might be true even at the upper end of the market."
The 2024 rateable valuation was $35m.
He said it was often best to take out the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent of sales from the data because they were so unrepresentative of the rest of the market.
"Certainly, the leasehold place in Auckland at such a cheap rate does sort of highlight that when you have real limitations on the property that you're purchasing and what you can do with it and how it operates and similar, then you get compensated for that," Olsen said.
"You don't have to pay quite as much because you can't do nearly as much with it either... we've heard concerns over time from people over leasehold properties, how much that can sometimes cost them in the long term.
"So sometimes a shorter or smaller upfront cost, but a longer term liability they have to look after."
He said in general, houses' values were set by the market.
"This is true in the housing market in general, but very true at the upper end. A house is worth what someone is willing to sell it for and what another person is willing to pay for it."
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