MUNSTER sales

Although modest outside, Stoneacre, Kenmare was built and finished to an exceptional standard by two interior designers who had made it their professional calling card. Below right: Adare’s 16,500 sq ft Winterwood was Limerick’s big sale at €1.78m

A Kenmare house made a reported €775,000 in an off-market sale. The problem is, no-one seems to know what house it was, or whose. Now, that’s going to annoy a few Kerry people

A modest-enough €300,000 house sale in affluent Killarney “is effectively, the new €1-million barrier,” says one of the town’s main agents, as Killarney’s very best sale was a very fine modern mansion for €1.47m (see pic p3).

Just half a dozen or so Killarney homes changed hands during 2012 for over €300,000, it’s reckoned, with Sika Lodge making one of the top prices, at €380,000 via Sherry FitzGerald Coghlan. The 2,900 sq ft home, at one stage a 10-bed B&B, had a €475,000 asking price when put to market in May 2011.

But, the magical, and in 2012 almost mythical, €1m mark was bounded past late in the year, when the sale of No 3, Ardagh, on Killarney’s Loretto Road (a sort of millionaire’s row of big houses in a gated development site), closed. The Property Price Register records the Ardagh sale at €1.47 million.

The modern mansion, likely to be over 4,000 sq ft and on several acres in the niche development of a half a dozen or so homes, will be one of Killarney’s contenders for next year’s 0.25% rate ‘Mansion Tax’, at the uppermost level of the new property tax.

Because of the perceived low sums being paid for some of Killarney’s better located homes, owners there are slow to go to market and there’s been a dearth of stock, and sales, as a sort of ‘chicken and egg’ result.

Surprisingly, while Killarney’s house market is generally seen as stronger than Tralee’s, Tralee produced a crop of larger house sales in 2012, with a half a dozen or so over €300,000, and quite a few hovering close to € 400,000. Top Tralee sale on the register was in the Casherwisheen scheme of large detached homes, where a new c 3,500 sq ft five-bed made €420,000, excluding VAT.

In Milltown, Dingle, a new-build at Fearan Geal made €444,000, (also exc VAT,) while a second-hand house at Burnham sold for a reported €380,000.

In Kenmare, meanwhile, home to the international jet-set, sales were slow but one, Stoneacre, a modern build of 5,000 sq ft on several great garden acres and home to a duo of interior designers, made c €1.5m via Savills and Sherry FitzGerald Daly: it featured in these pages in May 2011, when it went for sale guiding €1.8m.

Also in Kenmare’s Killarney Road, a house made a reported €775,000 in an off-market sale. The problem is, no-one seems to know what house it was, or whose. Now, that’s going to annoy a few Kerry people.

LIMERICK

It’s not the most expensive Munster house of 2012, but Limerick’s Winterwood must be about the very biggest house in size terms — try 16,500 sq ft. That’s about ten times the size of an already-decent detached four-bed family home.

Built in Adare Demesne on three acres by local property developer Robert Butler, palatial Winterwood was priced at a never-neverland €12m back in 2008.

By January of 2012, it was brought somewhat back closer to earth, when marked down to €2.8 million.

Now, it’s a top sale of 2012 for €1.78 million, with the sale being stamped in May of this year. Back in the early to mid-2000s, sites for similar Adare Manor demesne one-offs were selling for €1 million plus. Writing off Winterwood’s site value, the sale price still works out at a fairly miserly €100 per square foot, which isn’t a whole lot above average, bog-standard home build costs.

A significant Limerick sale just stamped early last year was Stormount House, Castleconnell, registered at €900,000, while weighing in at the €500,000 level was a Castletroy Golf Links Road home at Lissadell Court, and a Raheen home at Lower Church Road made €510,000.