Window-dressing lifts price $162,000 in three months

7 Beere Place, Meadowbank, Auckland.

A four-bedroom Meadowbank home bought for $973,000 in May was sold for $162,000 more three months later despite no renovations - a feat the agent puts down to the hired furniture he used to stage it.

The only touch-ups to the property between the sales were a lick of paint to some rooms and a tidy-up of the gardens.

A Chinese couple bought 7 Beere Place for $973,000, but put it back on the market two weeks later with an asking price of $1.180 million. They sold it in August for $1.135 million - $235,000 above CV - to a New Zealand couple with two children who intended to use it as a family home.

But an Auckland woman who looked through the property said it was "unloved" and needed a lot of work. It still had its three original 1970s bathrooms, original kitchen, cracked tiles, dripping taps, a leak next to the pool, old and dirty net curtains and a damp smell downstairs.

The couple never lived in the house as they found out two weeks after they bought it that they needed to return home and live there for two years before they could claim superannuation and get it transferred to New Zealand.

The home had been owned for 31 years by an elderly couple who bought it for $31,500.

Harcourts agent Ronald Lim said that when he first sold it, the owners had their own furniture in it. But the new owners had modern furniture put in it when it went back on the market.

"Presentation is everything.

"People who saw it originally felt so differently from when they saw it before."

But the Auckland house-hunter did not agree.

"You had the juxtaposition of the nice home-staged bed with all the lovely linen, and then these cruddy old dirty curtains with holes in them."

She was shocked to hear how much the house had sold for.

"It was just about falling down, it was in such a bad state, it was ridiculous."

The couple ended up buying a "do-up" in Kohimarama.
7 Beere Place, Meadowbank

Sold: May $973,000
Sold: August $1.135 million
CV: $900,000
4 bed, 3 bath
1970 wooden home
743sq m section, 254sq m floor