Graham Norton’s tweet goes global but West Cork neighbour sells home to Irish buyer

He tweeted sweet nothings to help out his neighbour — but, in the heel of the hunt, the global exposure that Graham Norton gave a West Cork house sale on his doorstep mattered little when it finally changed hands — after nearly a year and a half on the market — to an Irish buyer.

Just turning up on the Price Register as selling for €975,000 is Kitchen Cove, Ahakista, a glorious seaside bolt-hole with its own beach and pier and five acres of grounds, facing Graham Norton’s own Georgian holiday house on Dunmanus bay.

When it went to market in July 2014, with a guiding price of €1.2m, Norton who now has 1.18m Twitter followers tweeted ‘anybody looking for a house?,’ providing a link to Kitchen Cove’s sale website.

It prompted lots of likes and retweets, and drove online traffic to Skibbereen estate agent Charles P McCarthy’s website. Digital traffic jumped up from 30 hits one day, to 5,500 the next — the phones started to ring, and viewings were booked, from home and away.

However, the eventual buyer didn’t come from overseas but is understood to be an Irish family, based on the East Coast, and into watersports.

Local sources say the new owners sold a family-owned, Irish brand company last year in a multi-million euro deal, but auctioneer Mr McCarthy declined to comment or confirm the reports, other than to say the buyer was indeed an Irish family.

“The exposure Graham Norton gave it definitely increased the profile, but it didn’t bring the purchaser at the end. I showed this to him in 2014, and he’d been looking for a coastal property like this, not necessarily in Ahakista, and he bought it,” said Mr McCarthy.

However, even if Graham Norton doesn’t get to share a finder’s fee, or a seller’s commission, he played a part in linking another celeb to Ahakista living: Californian Simpson’sartist Harry Shearer, who voices characters such as Mr Burns, Smithers, and Principal Skinner bought in Ahakista after appearing on the Graham Norton Show.

The vendors of the upgraded farmhouse-style Kitchen Cove have UK and Irish roots, bought it off-market in 2002.