Clean quality tillage in three blocks
“It’s seldom a farm like this comes up in the area and its more or less without waste,” says selling agent, Ernest Forde, of Hodnett Forde.
“It’s been in tillage for the last number of years, but it’s all-round, top-quality land. And it’s one of the most desirable places in the county, in terms of location”
The agent is pricing the land at €12,000 or upwards, he says, but he expects to make €14,000 an acre, on the basis of demand and high-value sales locally.
The farm previously belonged to Dick Bryan — a master farmer, says Forde. Bryan often appeared on television and and ran a mixed dairy and tillage farm at Ratharoon, until it was sold to the present vendor’s family.
This is a non-residential sale only, however, with the inclusion of a number of older farm buildings and can be offered in three lots, because of the amount of road frontage.
The first is lot A, comprising 51.2 acres; the second is lot B, which includes the farm buildings and 25.3 acres; and the final lot is the entire.
Road frontage is excellent, because the land is divided by a public road and the farm is just three miles from Bandon, on the Ballinadee road.
Renowned for producing high-yielding crops, the land is after spring barley, and the farmyard, which needs modernisation, has a four-bay, covered silage pit with lean-to, four-bay lean-to storage shed, and two stone buildings.
Although it’s in tillage, the land was a grassland farm at one stage and with some strong dairy operators in the area, this Ratharoon sale is going to appeal to a broad church of buyers.
In fact, there’s an offer of €12,000 per acre on the smaller lot, at present, says Ernest Forde, who expects the price to build up in the next few weeks. The same agent, jointly with Irish and European, has also sold a substantial, mixed farm at Coolkirky, Riverstick, for a sum rumoured to be close to €1.9m, but he couldn’t confirm the price or the identity of the buyer.
However, the purchaser is believed to be an Australian, ex-pat who intends returning to Ireland to farm the land, according to local sources.
The Coolkirky farm, which is a substantial holding at 214 acres was nevertheless slow to sell, it was first for sale in 2009 at a price of €3.5m in a falling market and the property will require upgrading.
That being said, it made in excess of its guide price of €1.7m and the new buyer may have bought value in the long term, as, should the land be improved, the value would increase as demand for south Cork land is constant. Some 25 acres of forestry is included with 160, good arable acres.
Meanwhile, Ernest Forde has also just listed a 22.5-acre parcel of tillage land at Reanies, Nohoval, which is already under offer at €250,000, but expected to make closer to €270,000, or €12,000 per acre.
Roadside land, laid out in four fields it has views over Nohoval Cove and Reanies Bay, and could be bought by a qualifying hobby farmer, but there’s been considerable local farming interest already.
