Landmark sale of 91.6 acres for €2m at Cahir
Featured on these pages on May 24 last (as a 92.5-acre holding), a 91.6-acre non-residential farm in South Tipperary was sold at public auction last week, comfortably exceeding the high expectations that are now de rigueur for large blocks of high-quality pasture in the Golden Vale.
The joint agents handling this landmark sale were Alison De Vere Hunt of Cashel Marts and John Fitzgerald of Dougan Fitzgerald Auctioneers, Clonmel. The official guide price was in the region of €17,000 to €18,000 per acre but before the event, Alison was already admitting that this farm would go a bit higher: “We would put it at around that price but we would be of the opinion that, given the right conditions on the day itself, it could break the €20,000 mark.”
The farm in question is situated in the townland of Beechmount, close to Cahir, Co Tipperary — an area of exceptional land quality and intensive farming of all kinds, but principally dairying. The farm is currently in tillage but that was no barrier to any potentially interested parties from the other sectors. The proximity of a sub-station also opened up the possibility of using some of the land for solar energy use.
It turned out that conditions were right on the big day, Wednesday, June 20, at the Cahir House Hotel. A large crowd turned out on the day, with the usual collection of serious potential bidders turning up in person, legal representatives and various onlookers.
The farm was described by the selling agents as “a smashing piece of ground. It’s all there in one block with over a kilometre of road frontage. It’s just on the outskirts of Cahir but it’s also linked up to the main Tipperary-Waterford road, as it’s just off that road as well.”
Suitable for all kinds of agricultural enterprise, there were surely representatives of dairying, tillage and equine sectors present on the day of the auction. The farm’s proximity to the M8 also meant that interest came from far and wide.
John Fitzgerald conducted the auction, which turned out to be a relatively fast affair. Whatever number of interested parties there were in the room at the time, it only came down to three bidders who were actively involved on the floor. Two of those were solicitors representing persons unknown while the third bidder was a farmer representing himself, according to Alison.
The bidding started at €1 million and then went up in regular increments until it reached €1,900,000
“We then broke for a recess and when we came back, the property was announced as being on the market.”
The bids continued to come in fast and furious — as they had been before the break — and they continued until the property reached the remarkable price of €2,125,000, or €23,200 per acre.
“It was a pretty fast auction… It was bought by a solicitor in trust.” It was, Alison says, one of the highest prices paid for purely agricultural land in Munster in the last few years. “This was a piece of land that had neither water nor an electricity supply and it has always been in tillage. For us, this is in essence back to the boom in terms of prices for land. It exceeded our expectations but we were confident that we would get somewhere around €20,000 or so per acre for it.”
It was certainly a stunning price for land, particularly for land with absolutely no foreseeable value in terms of future housing development. Coming on the back of the massive sale of the 101 acres in Cork for €5.8m million (a piece of ground that does hold some hope value in terms of development), it seems that the boom times and speculators have returned.
