Rundown State house sold for $140,000

Press, 8 December 1987, Page 48

Rundown State house sold for $140,000

PA Wellington A rundown State house in Wellington’s posh suburb of Khandallah has been sold by the Housing Corporation to a private developer for $140,000. The sale was part of the corporation's new commercial approach to property management, said a senior engineering officer, Dale Wills. The Ravi Street house was the fourth in the Wellington area to be sold to a private buyer this year. Such sales would become ’more common in the future as the corporation started to target more of its "high value” properties for sale to private buyers, said Mr Wills.

At the moment most sales of State houses are made to existing tenants to enable them to buy a house on a cheaper loan. But a Ravi Street tenant, Rob Hocking, who has now been relocated to a new subdivision in Karori, is not happy about the corporation’s policy of selling to private buyers. “They should be selling them to poor people living in them and giving them cheap loans to buy them and not selling to a rich private buyer,” he said. “There are plenty of other houses on the open market.” Mr Hocking said he was interested in buying the house in a year or two and was upset the corporation did not consult

him before selling. Mr Wills said the reason the house was not offered to Mr Hocking was that the corporation’s “high value” houses were beyond the means of its tenants. The corporation could increase its housing stock at no extra cost by selling the high value houses at market rates. “For the price of one house in an expensive area we can buy two elsewhere,” Mr Wills said. “If we have a house with a market value of $300,000 it is pointless for us to sit on it” Selling older, rundown properties privately was also a way of avoiding spending money on renovating them.