Buyer’s blind faith in €1.6m dream home

IT’S tough at the top end of the market – but not impossible.

A signed, sealed and completed sale for around €1.6 million has just been made on Orchard House, a plum home in Cork city’s suburban Maryborough Orchard, a built-out scheme of serviced sites for substantial homes next to Maryborough House Hotel.

And the buyer hasn’t even seen it yet: it was bought in trust, on behalf of an overseas buyer who is moving to Cork for work. The sale (20 months after first going on the market) was slow in maturing, and a number of deals or ‘sale agreeds’ had stumbled. It last collapsed just several weeks ago, when a couple, relocating to Cork and with international business commitments, pulled unexpectedly pulled out.

Within 48-hours auctioneer Dennis Guerin (and despondent vendors) showed it to a new person, acting with ‘power of attorney’ for a different up-market house hunter, also currently overseas. He agreed a sale on the unidentified buyer’s behalf a day after viewing, contracts were signed, and the sale has already closed.

The speed of closing is rare – as is finding a substitute buyer within hours of losing the last one. The fact it made even more money just adds to the rare series of sale steps.

The 5,000 sq ft Victorian facsimile Maryborough Orchard House first went up to sale in October 2008, guiding €2 million via Mr Guerin, who is MD of Frank V Murphy & Co: at the time he noted that a few years earlier, when first built, it was valued at €2.5m.

A private bid of €2m was rejected around the same time, and it came back to public market in January of this year guiding a reduced €1.5m and was believed to have made close to this sum last month when ‘sale agreed’ with contracts signed.

Now, it has switched buyer, and also for a slightly higher price, likely to be around €1.6m but Mr Guerin steadfastly refused to comment or confirm the price achieved, only saying the buyer had secured an outstanding home.

The five/six-bed three-storey house is immaculately styled, inside and out. “In about 25 years selling houses in Cork, I’ve never seen one as well-finished as this, it is a real credit to the vendors,” he stated.

Mr Guerin added that one couldn’t build and finish to this level of perfection in such a site, for this sort of sum.

Disappointed? The same selling agent, meanwhile, has bids currently around the €1.5m level on the 3,800 sq ft Model Farm Road house, Lindisfarne, a 20-year old, high quality home on a far larger two-thirds of acre site.