Massive Beazley family estate at the Mount listed for first time in 70 years

Back in the early 1950s pioneering builder Barry Beazley had the amazing foresight to buy an entire acre of land on the Mount Maunganui beachfront. He paid less than £10,000 ($20,000) for his slice of paradise.

Today, that exceptional estate, which spreads across three freehold titles and 4866m², has come to market. Listing agent Peter Clarke of Bayleys Mt Maunganui says the original 1950s dwelling remains as a nostalgic reminder of the Beazley Homes era but the real worth of the property is in the land and absolute beachfront location.

“It’s the largest private landholding on this world-renowned stretch of coastline,” he says. “It’s not just a property, it’s an heirloom. The size, the position, the uninterrupted beachfront, there’s nothing else quite like it anywhere on The Mount.”

Barry Beazley’s daughter Linda says the company her father started, Beazley Homes, produced more than 300 solid-rimu transportable houses every year at the height of the 1960s housing boom.

“I believe our house was the first Beazley home, and he built it himself with one other man. It then doubled as one of his earliest show homes.”

Linda’s mother, Doreen, transformed the surrounding dunes into a lush tropical haven, complete with one of the Bay of Plenty’s first resort-style swimming pools.

“It was five metres deep with a diving board, slide and natural hot-spring-fed spa,” Linda says. “Our backyard quickly became a local icon featured in magazines and even playing host to the Miss New Zealand contest, where music legend Peter Posa performed to contestants by the pool’s edge.”

Linda says the home became synonymous with gatherings and celebration. It was available to many charities and lots of family and friends’ weddings were held there. “Even though our family eventually moved abroad, the Mount always remained our sanctuary.”

Linda says she lived on the beach as a child: “When we were 10, my girlfriend from three houses down and I would swim out to sea about a mile with our flippers on. No parents went down to beach, and we never thought about sharks. It was a different world back then.

“We would be pushed out of the house in the morning and told to be back for lunch or before dark. We would play in the lupins and mingimingi - often war games.”

Back in the ‘60s the site was a family compound with three houses and lots of cousins and friends to play with.

“We would be pushed out of the house in the morning and told to be back for lunch or before dark. We would play in the lupins and mingimingi - often war games.”

Back in the ‘60s the site was a family compound with three houses and lots of cousins and friends to play with.

A fence defines the boundary between the Beazley land and the sand dunes. Photo: BAYLEYS

“There was a campground over the road. We used to charge the children staying there sixpence, or it may have been threepence, to come and have a swim in our pool. Mum would look out the window from the house, which was a very long way from the pool, and see all these little heads bobbing about.”

Linda thinks they may have told the other children the money was for charity, but believes it may well have been spent at the lolly shop down the road.

Today, the estate is a developer’s dream, being one of the last undeveloped blocks of land on the Mount Maunganui beachfront, spreading over numbers 65, 67 and 69 Oceanbeach Rd, with a combined value of more than $22m.

Linda says the sale is a significant emotional milestone for the family: “It’s time for someone with vision to create the next chapter for this land. It’s been our family’s story for more than 70 years, and now it can become someone else’s.”

In the meantime, however, the house remains something of a time warp, looking exactly as it was all those years ago. “The wardrobes are like time stood still,” Linda says. “All our old memorabilia is in there.”

Cotality puts the median price of property in Mount Maunganui at $1,121,446. In May this year another smaller beachfront property with a contemporary home sold for $7.56m, which was nearly $3m over the RV.

The highest price paid in Mount Maunganui so far is $11m for an Oceanbeach Rd property, which beat the $10.2m sale of richlister Colin Giltrap’s Mount penthouse apartment in 2021.