First the Ferraris, then the mansion – tech leader takes record property hit

Jon and Penny McGettigan are sanguine about the record $750,000 loss they’ve made on selling their grand six-bedroom family home overlooking Raumati Beach.
Their daughters had left home, cleaning the swimming pools was a faff, and they didn’t want to refix their 3.9 percent mortgage at higher rates – so it was time to downsize.
First, Jon sold his Ferraris, then they sold the house. Next to go will be the rental properties. They had bought the house for $4.45m in September 2021 , right at the peak of the market; they sold it three years later for $3.7m. But, says Jon, their new smaller house has a better view of Kāpiti Island …
“We did know that we were gonna take a hit,” says the 49-year-old former Datacom executive. “We had planned to stay there longer, but we didn’t realise both our kids were going to leave.
“I’d had a couple of Ferraris in the garage as well, which I decided to sell, just to buy some time. I’m not actually working at the moment, so we’ve kind of changed the chapter in our life. We’ve just look to slow things down and heavily reduce the mortgage.
“And to be honest, we’re getting a little bit sick of having the swimming pools because our kids just went down to the beach instead.”
The official address of the house they sold is on Matatua Rd, which runs 1.3km along behind the dunes on Raumati Beach. But it’s actually on a private back road called Goodwood Rd, on an exclusive estate by the same name.
Protected from the prying eyes of passersby, the 10 discreet seaside houses are built on what was once the estate of New Zealand’s wealthy Todd family; apparently, the McGettigans’ house was their bowling green or petanque court.
But Jon didn’t always have time to enjoy it.
For 12 years, he’d travelled intensively as Australia-Pacific regional director for Fortinet. Then he took a job at Datacom that enabled him to stay closer to home – but was just in time for the company’s largest restructuring in 65 years.
“I knew what was happening. It was all clearly communicated. And I thought, oh, this is a perfect time to do some things, get rid of some assets, get the health back to top level again, and crack on and enjoy this new house.”
New data shows that houses like theirs in exclusive private estates have been among the biggest winners, and the biggest losers, of the past three years of turmoil in the property market. “These figures reflect a changing market, with buyers now holding the upper hand,” says Kelvin Davidson, CoreLogic’s company’s chief property economist.
The McGettigans’ house was one of the homes that suffered the biggest loss in the three years since the housing market peaked; one of the biggest gains was a house in Arrowtown’s high-end Millbrook Resort. This was also aided by strong price gains in all of the South Island with the exception of Dunedin.
The owners of the three-bedroom Ayrburn Ridge house bought the 617 sq metre property for $3.5m in December 2020, and sold it again this August for $5.6m – a tidy $2.1m gain over three-and-half years.
Davidson says the resilience of the Queenstown Lakes District market stands out. Even average houses made half million dollar profits on resale, there.
There were much bigger gains made, but only by vendors who had held onto their properties for much longer. “Hold period is key,” says Davidson. “Even with the softer market conditions of the past 18 months, property owners who have held their properties for eight to nine years are still likely to make a gross profit.
“While median resale profits are still significant, especially for long-term owners, most owner-occupiers won’t see a cash windfall. Instead, the new equity will typically be rolled into their next purchase – unless they’re downsizing or moving to a less expensive area.”
The properties most likely to be sold at a loss were apartments, especially in Auckland. But smaller districts like Kaipara, Ōpōtiki, South Wairarapa and Tasman have also been hard-hit by the downturn.
Sotheby’s International Realty sales associate Suzette McArtney sold the McGettigans’ property in Raumati. She say the loss was reflective of a 20 percent decline in the market over three years.
“And that’s what I tell clients, right? You’re buying and selling in the same market. So don’t be so protective on the price, you have to look at the big picture. I give this advice to all my clients across the board, including my own mother-in-law.
“Because sometimes vendors get fixated on that number, and I ask them, is this $10,000 or $50,000 going to change where you’re doing next? Well then, if you’re downsizing, take the money.
“I had a client in Ōtaki who was just so insulted with the price – they were expecting a lot higher. And I said to them, look, this cash offer you have in front of you, is it going to take you to where you want to go? They were so angry, but I told them to sleep on it.
“The next morning they rang and they said, you know what? You’re absolutely right.”
Most people might avoid selling at the bottom of the market, unless they really have to. So when Newsroom has previously reported on these CoreLogic figures, the properties worst impacted were sometimes being sold because of a sudden relationship breakup, or they’d been flooded.
“It’s nothing scandalous like that,” says McArtney, who’s originally from California. “You know, it really just is the market. It wasn’t through lack of interest. I actually had dozens of serious interested parties look at it.
“For Jon and Penelope, they weren’t looking at it as, oh, ‘I’m losing from $4.5m to $3.7m’. They thought of it as, ‘I’m going into the next home I want to be in’. And I think that’s a much positive outlook in life and in real estate.”
As for Jon, he says he follows the real estate market pretty closely, both in New Zealand and around the world. “You can see the hardship that’s going on around house prices because of inflation,” her says.
“You hear about a lot of hard talking in the US about driving the economy in the right direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing Christopher Luxon starting to take some sort of guidance along the same lines.”