It has no insulation, flaking paint, questionable pipes and all my old furniture and artwork. At the auction, bidding was competitive. 

Embarrassingly, my algorithm knows that I like to browse real estate listings online. The ones I like best are old and tatty, places where the cabinetry in the kitchen hasn’t been touched since the 50s and the carpet smells like cat piss. Some are tiny and near the beach where computers don’t work. Others need so much tender love and care you’d simply have to quit your job. The algorithm has learned that if it puts an old shitter in front of me, I will click.

The week before last, the shitter was very, very familiar. In the photo, a heap of old wood held itself together with flakes of paint in between two Grey Lynn grey renovated villas. The sash window of the front bedroom was propped open with a block and that funky tree (weed?) growing in the 10cm between the house and the garage (not in service due to the roller door not rolling) was reaching for the gutters. A wiggly line of old bricks, laid by my very own hands, tried to keep the grass out of a parsley and flower bed. When I moved in here in 2018 the latest crisis was that numerous keys had been lost through the holes left by rotted planks of the front porch. We fished them out with wire coat hangers and placed scraps of plywood over the holes. When I moved out in 2021, I thought houses that didn’t have mould were so flash. 

“This classic 1907 villa might not have aged like a fine whisky,” read the listing. I snorted from my new house five blocks away. “Unlike old whisky, this home can easily be restored”. I thought about the time that the neighbour came knocking because clumps of toilet paper and some other stuff was travelling from underneath our house nearer and nearer to his garden. Unbeknownst to us, a pipe had blocked, the toilet had disconnected and had been flushing straight down onto the ground. When the plumber came, he jimmied out the pipe, but told us it was so tiny that it was only a matter of time before it blocked up again. I would venture to say that restoration will not be easy. 

Also in the listing, the Phoenix palms in the backyard are described as “established trees”. In my time, they were infested with rats and we were afraid of moving their fallen fronds as they have sharp, toxin-carrying spines which are known to cause infections. We asked the landlord to trim or remove them, but he said it was too expensive. 

Ah, the landlord. We only met him in person once. He came wearing full motorbike leathers and told us he liked surfing. My flatmate may or may not have answered the door in undies because we weren’t expecting him on a Saturday morning. He said he might re-paint the exterior of the house, but then it never happened. He was surprisingly handsome and very cordial via email, though not willing to spend on maintenance. He never raised the rent and let us do what we liked to the house and to the garden. Was it legal? We were never convinced, though there were some Healthy Homes checklists he’d scrawled on added to the back of the lease.

The thing about this house is that it’s in Grey Lynn. It’s a suburb that is synonymous with gentrification. Its rows of colonial cottages and villas are due to the fact it was settled early, as part of the first 3000-acre block of land given to the British by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei in 1840. For a long time, the area was an affordable working class neighbourhood. In the 1950s and 1960s the houses were run-down and many immigrants, particularly from Pacific Islands, settled there. Then the 1970s saw a renewed interest in Victorian properties and inner city suburbs. People with more means bought and renovated first in Ponsonby and then Grey Lynn. A growing group of young, socially liberal, tertiary-educated Pākehā wanted to live in this area (I mean… I’m guilty). House prices and rents increased at the same time that Pacific people faced discrimination from Police and landlords. 

Now, Grey Lynn is synonymous with trendy cafes, activewear and yo-pros. Unrenovated houses are like hens’ teeth. Where we saw a house big enough to share with friends and close enough to walk or cycle to university, property investors saw an opportunity to add value. As the listing put it, “it’s a prime opportunity for renovators or investors to transform it into a stunning, quintessential Grey Lynn jewel.” 

I sent the link to my old flatmate. “Wow wow wow. Wonder how long till it’s bulldozed,” she replied, armed with an architecture degree and knowledge of the house as intimate as mine. Together from our now separate homes, we noseyed through the listing’s photos. The room I’d painted a dark sage green was just how I’d left it, with two patches left unpainted that I still think make it look somewhat Parisian. Another room is a yellowish green that I warned our flatmate against when she had swatches lined up on the wall. Later I bit my tongue when I saw how well it matched her wooden furniture and big Kandinsky print. 

Most unsettling was the lounge. It looks exactly the same as when I moved out, despite the fact I couldn’t name a single person that lives there anymore. There is the table and chairs I sourced from a friend’s dispersing flat. There are the DIY built-in mouches (mattress-couch) that my flatmate and I had re-configured with a handsaw during a lockdown refresh. There are cushions I sewed up. There is the shelf I recused from the side of the road. On one wall a big screen printed banner I made at art school still hangs, on another wall is an artwork I bought to support a friend and in the hallway a printed poem another friend wrote. 

For the plot, and to pay our respects, we decided to go to the open home. When Sunday rolled around, my ex-flattie was struck by period cramps, so I went without her. The real estate agent was wearing a white T-shirt so clean it looked like it hadn’t been washed yet. I confessed straight away that I was not a potential buyer but a nosey ex-resident and then started pointing out all the stuff that was “ours”. It was charming, I think. My flatmate’s passport mugshot stuck up in the kitchen – ours. My lockdown drawings by the bathroom – ours. The weighted hula hoop abandoned in the garden – ours. That random circular hole in the floor – not ours. The fridge – new! I live-streamed my visit to my bloody old flattie through a series of photos. “Can’t believe it’s all there,” she replied, along with “Hahahhahahahaha – Dying – That’s so funny”.

There was hot interest in the property, said the clean agent, despite it being “not in a good state”. Someone had made a pre-auction offer of $1.8 million. From his giddy tone, I gathered that this was more than anyone expected. The owner had agreed to bring the auction forward straight away, cutting out two weeks of viewings and advertising.

The following Tuesday there was a bidding war. As most people who don’t have millions of dollars to spend on a dilapidated house have to do on a Tuesday, I was at work. In an email, the agent told me there was “competitive bidding” at the auction. The final price was $1,980,000. 

The house is so rundown it may need to be completely rebuilt, but the 400m2 of land it sits on is estimated to be worth $2,325,000. My landlord bought the whole thing, in much better condition, for $702,000 in 2007. 

There’s no doubt it sold “as is”, but I’d love to see the list of chattels. Does it include the oven that was dropped around as a surprise when the landlord upgraded his kitchen? Does it include the mouches? My art print? The mugshot? The black mold in the bathroom? The cute little field mice living in the kitchen cupboards? I have a feeling that if I walk past in a couple of months most of these things will be in a skip outside. The sound of an angle grinder will be ringing through the neighbourhood but no-one will have the grounds to complain, since their renovations were all just as loud.