Hotels ‘booked out’

HOTEL sales momentum is continuing to gather pace as the year’s first quarter ends, with sales agreed or closed totalling around €10m at Cork’s Oriel House Hotel, in Ballincollig, in Charleville, and in Wexford’s Bunclody, where the Millrace (previously a Carlton hotel), has just been sold by CBRE.

John Hughes, of CBRE Hotels, said the Millrace had been bought by Vintop Ltd, associated with Almas View Investments, which is based in the United Arab Emirates, and associated with Dublin company, McGettigan Management Services.

The same owners previously acquired the Ambassador Hotel, in Cork City, the Limerick City Hotel (previously Jury’s) and the Clanree Hotel, in Letterkenny, Donegal. Now, the 2004-built, 60-bed Millrace, in Wexford, joins their burgeoning stable. It was priced at €950,000 with CBRE, and may have sold for below that sum, and was offered by receivers, KPMG.

Meanwhile, agent Savill’s website this month lists the revamped, 78-bed Oriel House as ‘sale agreed’: it went to the open market at the end of January, priced at €6m, following a major €10m overhaul and extension with leisure centre added in 2006. It’s the only hotel in Ballincollig and stirred very considerable interest.

Also gone ‘sale agreed’ very recently with Savills, was the 91-bed Charleville Park Hotel in North Cork, previously owned by the same Cork Luxury Hotels family group as the Ambassador Hotel, in the city.

The Charleville Park went to market in February, priced at €3.75m.

Estate agents, Tom Barrett and Denis O’Donoghue, of Savills, declined to confirm any details of these rapidly agreed sales, pending closing of the deals.

They’re unlikely to close out as swiftly as the Blarney Golf Resort sale did to Northern Ireland buyer, Tommy O’Gorman, who snapped up that golf course, hotel, land and 38 holiday lodges last month, within three days of first investigating it, making it the bargain buy, so far, of 2014, at €2.5m. Mr O’Gorman is not believed to be involved in either of the two current Cork hotel sales.