A waterfront estate on Hobart’s eastern shore has sold for $8.533 million, breaking the real estate record for a suburban house in Tasmania.
The five-bedroom, three-bathroom home is located on more than 10,000 square metres of land on Howrah Point, adjacent to Little Howrah Beach, with views of the River Derwent and kunanyi/Mount Wellington as a backdrop.
The property, named “Domi Riviere”, had been used as a family home for nearly 30 years before it went on the market about a month ago, receiving interest from buyers locally, interstate, and overseas.
“To have a significant land holding and level of privacy on the waterfront within such close proximity to the city is extremely rare,” Knight Frank Tasmania residential sales agent Brad Stephens said.
“Properties like this don’t go on the market very often because they are passed through generations or are retained within families.”
While Mr Stephens could not comment on who bought the property or what future plans they had for the estate, he did say there was broad interest.
“Some people wanted to keep it as a family home, other individuals wanted to chop it down and sell different parts of the property and look for a return from a development perspective.
“It was an even split between developers and people who wanted to occupy the home.”
According to property website Domain, the median price for a four-bedroom house in Howrah is currently more than $800,000, compared to $644,000 last year and $623,000 in 2020.
The northern Hobart suburb of Glenorchy has also seen a significant increase in the median house price, currently sitting at $705,000 for a four-bedroom home compared to $520,000 in 2021.
CoreLogic head of research Eliza Owen said Hobart had seen “the greatest capital growth of any of the capital city housing markets in the past five years”, at 70 per cent.
“It’s gone from being one of the most affordable capital cities to one of the least, and that’s across both house prices and rental values,” she said.
The demand for property in Hobart has also spilt over to the regions, with growing interest in places such as Launceston.
“Launceston has seen additional interest from investors and even locals who are priced out of Hobart,” Ms Owen said.
“That kind of housing growth has spread through to the whole of the state.”
But CoreLogic expects the demand for housing will “cool off” after an extremely long stretch of growth.
“Our [CoreLogic] Home Value Index showed a decline in values of 0.3 per cent across Hobart for the month of April and we expect that trend to continue,” Ms Owen said.
“When you get an increase in interest rates and mortgage rates you are increasing the cost of debt, and when you increase the cost of something, people can afford less of it.”
