Builder-buyers return

This Blackrock Road, Cork, site, is back on the market with full planning for 18 large detached houses.

CORK City house-building land off the suburban Blackrock Road, which made €10.7m at a charged auction back in 2006, is now for sale for €2m, with full planning in place for 18 large detached homes.

Being sold for receiver Kieran Wallace of KPMG, the land value on the six-acre site now equates to €112,000 per house site.

There’s full planning in place for the 18 houses until 2018 and they range in size from 2,400/2,800 sq ft four-beds, to five-beds of 3,400 sq ft.

The 6.18 acres is at Cleve Hill, off the city end of the Blackrock Road and was sold by the Murphy family at auction in summer 2006, at the market’s absolute peak; it was also when €12m was paid for three acres on Maryborough Hill, a record €4m an acre for Cork house building land.

At the time of Howard Holdings purchasing the Cleve Hill land, there was a buoyant expectation that houses built on it could fetch as much as €2m each.

Now, that’s the price guide for the six acres, offered by DTZ Sherry FitzGerald and Sherry FitzGerald.

They say it’s going to be a real test of the re-emerging appetite for land, given the shortage of new homes’ product on the Cork market.

Seamus Costello of DTZ Sherry FitzGerald says it’s a prime, ready-to-go residential development site for luxury homes, and he predicts strong interest, given its location off the Blackrock Road, within a walk of the city centre.

It’s also expected to tap into a new generation of builder-buyers. Just two significant residential Cork City sites have come to market in the past 18 months: Nemo Rangers’ former pitches on seven acres sold last year for €3m, with planning in place for around 100 houses. It’s thought it was bought speculatively. And, the c€2m sale of five acres of Ballintemple land being sold for Eircom was halted several months ago as the company does a strategic review of its properties. When re-offered by Eircom it is expected to go for a still-higher sum. It has 18 bidders.

In a different sales league, given the lower density of development and larger detached houses being allowed, the 18 Hogan Architecture-designed houses could be expected to sell from under and over the €1m mark, says Sheila O’Flynn of Sherry FitzGerald predicting local and national interest.

A single site for one house sold last year on the Blackrock Road for over €500,000 with Sherry FitzGerald, and house designs here at Cleve Hill, in a currently overgrown woodland site, are for three-storey houses.

Details: DTZ Sherry FitzGerald; 021-4275454, 021-4273041.