Kingsley Hotel snapped up for €6m by Chinese owners of Fota Island estate
The Beijing-based Kang family has added the €6m Kingsley Hotel to their summer €20m purchase of the 500-acre Fota estate in East Cork, now book-ending the city east and west with five-star products.
The family, represented by spokesperson Xui Kang, plan further spending at each Cork hotel, which is likely to see the extended family with Cork business links (exports of pork and fish to China) spend at least €30m in all in the southern city, and employ up to 400.
With hotels in Beijing and Shanghai, the Kang family had eyed up the Kingsley opportunity several years ago, long before either it or the Fleming-developed Fota Resort came to market, say Michael Cronin and Conor Pyne of O’Connor Pyne Accountants, who acted for the wealthy, low-key family.
The Kingsley sale, via Denis O’Donoghue of Savills, should provide a 120-job boost to the tourism sector in 2014 after necessary repair work to the riverside hotel, built on the Lee Fields flood plain, is carried out.
It was affected by devastating floods in Nov 2009 after a major water discharge from the Inniscarra dam. Legal action against the ESB is being advanced by UCC, which suffered tens of millions of euro damage.
Reinstating the Kingsley Hotel’s ground floor, and its basement car-parking, is likely to cost €3m to €4m.
Across the road from the County Hall on the Carrigrohane Road, and built on the site of an outdoor baths, the 130-bed Kingsley Hotel was developed in the 1990s by hoteliers Tom Kelly and Tom McCarthy.
It was upgraded in 2006 to five-star standard, with new suites and apartments added at a reported further cost of €30m. Its upper rooms were unaffected by the damage, but have not been used since 2009, nor has its 200-function facilities.
However, 18 serviced apartments built alongside the hotel have been rented and will bring an income of €275,000 to the Kang family.
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