College Road side-site sells swiftly

A SIDE garden site, with full planning for a detached house, has swiftly gone ‘sale agreed’ on Cork city’s Orchard Road, as a do-er upper a few doors away gets a price cut and change of selling agent.

Swiftly plucked in this setting is the site for a four-bed, 1,600 sq ft house at the residential road’s entrance by College Road. It publicly hit the market in early February,

priced at €295,000, with agents Frank V Murphy, and is likely to have been sale agreed at a sub-€300k sum.

A couple of doors away, the five-bedroomed, detached house, Auburn, is freshly priced at €475,000 by Johnny O’Flynn, of Sherry FitzGerald: it had hit the late summer 2010 market with another firm, seeking €650,000, which reflected the area’s up-market credentials and previous strong sales (there’s rumours of a very good house here about to come quietly up for sale).

Auburn is set just down below road level and backs onto the Brookfield complex, where there are plans afoot to change the current hotel to nursing home usage.

Although needing refurbishment and modernisation, Mr O’Flynn says Auburn “offers fantastic scope and is well laid out with a generous balance of living and bedroom accommodation.”