House on the Hill fetches £1.1 million at auction
Bidders went well above the £700,000 starting bid for a former Black Country care home that eventually sold for £1.1 million.
The House on the Hill, in Little Aston, near Walsall, was the star lot at the property auction held at Villa Park.
The empty 13-bedroom building in Rosemary Hill Road was previously a care home called House on the Hill and has planning permission to be redeveloped to create a 22-bedroom care facility.
However it is not known who has bought it and what they intend to do to it.
Gurpreet Bassi, head of residential auctions at SDL Bigwood, said: “We were inundated with requests for viewings and had several offers on this property.
“We were very pleased with the result,” he added.
Another property to go for big money was the Ruskin Business Centre in Oldbury Road, Smethwick. The building was snapped up for £470,000.
A former police station on Bearwood Road, Smethwick, was also sold prior to the auction taking place. It has most recently been used as offices but could now be converted.
A vacant shop on Market Street, Stourbridge, was sold for £150,000, raising hopes fresh life could be breathed into the town centre unit.
But it was the House on the Hill in Little Aston that attracted the most interest in the room during the proceedings.
Elsewhere in the auction, a three-bedroom, semi-detached house in Halesowen was typical of the competitive bidding seen in the auction room.
The property in Witley Avenue, Halesowen, was offered with a guide price of around £70,000 and when the hammer fell it had sold for £171,000 to add £101,000 onto their takings.
A semi-detached, three-bedroom house in Oaklands Green, Bilston, which had a guide price of £19,000-to-£24,000 sold for more than four times that amount at £97,000.
Mr Bassi said of the sale: “We raised over £16.4m in our May auction and achieved an 85 per cent success rate which bodes well for our next auction where we expect another exciting catalogue to bring in eager buyers.”
