Rotting home you can’t live in gets baffling auction result
21 The Parade, Enfield. NSW real estate.
Picture what a circa $2.5m house would look like – this house probably isn’t what you had in mind.
A rotting timber house described as an uninhabitable “shack” has sold at auction for $2.41m, nearly $400,000 above the already lofty price it had been projected to sell for prior to the sale.
An incredible 25 bidders registered for the auction, despite the house in Enfield needing at least $500,000 in repairs to bring it up to a liveable standard.
To put that into context, the average Sydney house going under the hammer usually attracts about two to four bidders.
This house on The Parade in Enfield sold for $2.41m.
The house on The Parade sits on a 507sq m block and has been vacant for the past 18 months.
It is not known exactly how the property came to be in its current condition, but selling agent Matthew Blackmore of Richards Matthews Real Estate confirmed that it is not fit for habitation.
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Some of the most significant damage was at the base of the house, where timbers were reported to be rotting.
“There are holes in the ceiling, the floor is very old timbers and you have to be careful where you walk,” Mr Blackmore said before the auction, noting that none of these features had put off buyers.
Many of the interested parties wanted to knock the home down.
“It’s a very popular area,” he said. “Some of the people calling about it told me they had seen the house many times and had always thought to themselves they’d buy it if it came on the market.”
Most of the interested parties wanted to knock the original house down and replace it with a new build, Mr Blackmore said. Opportunities to build new housing in the suburb remain rare.
“A new house would probably be worth $3.8m, $3.9m,” Mr Blackmore said. “You’d have to spend about $1.2m-$1.5m on a build in this area to be in line with the (surrounding homes) … if you renovated you would probably need to spend half a million, it’s hard to say.”
The Enfield home went to auction with a $2m guide.
The sale follows a string of recent Sydney auctions featuring derelict houses that are not in a state fit for living.
Last week, a crumbling two-bedroom home on Barker St in Kingsford sold for $2.6m, $800,000 over reserve.
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“I can’t believe it, all the feedback was $1.75 million,” said selling agent Les Salem of Wolf Property Group. Mr Salem told The Daily Telegraph the guide had been set at $1.8m.
Another rundown, deceased estate at 108A The Boulevard, Strathfield, sold for $3,510,000 at auction last week, a price $610,000 over the $2.9m reserve.
A burnt house on the same street with no roof set jaws dropping when it went to auction in 2020.
The burnt house had been reportedly used as a drug lab.
The three-level home, built in the 1970s, was owned by a local doctor, who used the ground floor as his surgery and lived in the residence above.
The rotting Enfield home sold this week is located on The Parade, a street that is no stranger to outlandish sales.
In 2020, a house on The Parade that had been used as an alleged drug lab before it went up in flames sold at auction for $1.38m, considered unusually high at the time. The price for the house with no roof was $500,000 over the reserve.
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Home prices are expected to continue rising this year.
KPMG’s Residential Property Market Outlook June 2024 released last week forecast house prices will rise across the country by 5.3 per cent over the next six months through to the end of 2024.
They are then expected to rise by 5.6 per cent across the capital cities in 2025.
PropTrack figures indicated about 70 per cent of the properties scheduled to go to auction last week sold. About half of these properties sold in pre-auction deals.