You pay your money and make your choice

THE auctioneering cliché goes something like this. Land is so valuable because they are not making any more of it.

As a result, though, there's now added value to be gleaned from sub-dividing even little plots of land in areas where people really want it.

So it is with suburban houses; their side gardens can now be as valuable as the existing houses on site were just three or four years ago.

Witness Rostrevor, in sought-after Beaumont Crescent in Cork. This four-bed semi was sold last autumn, fetching just a little over €400,000, with its side garden marked out as a particular selling point.

The clued-in purchaser lost no time in getting full planning permission for a compact, detached two-storey, three-bed house on the site. And, now, the site itself is up for sale with several buying options quoted by selling agent Jarleth Boyd of Hamilton Osborne King.

The site, he says, can be had for a cool €200,000 (this is where readers look out over their own garden and try to put a price on a patch of lawn or consider reclaiming the ground occupied by the pond).

Alternatively, the house can be built for you on the site for the grand all-in sum of €350,000.

Or, you can go and buy the original house Rostrevor along with the site for €600,000 - a tidy enough return on the vendor's investment (even allowing for stamp duty, transaction costs and capital gains taxes) if and when it all pays off.

Land, huh! They may not be making any more of it, but they're certainly making more out of it.