From Astrophysics to Krispy Kreme to the Cork property market
John Lundy, Rebel Coffee Cork, 4, French Church Street
KRISPY Kreme. Like the glazing on its best-selling original doughnut, John Joseph Lundy will never shake off questions about his stint as director of real estate for the US chain in the New York Metropolitan Area. It seems those doughnuts are a global cause célèbre, the confectionary equivalent of a superstar selling out arenas, which is good going for a ring-shaped piece of sweet fried dough. For a reminder of their celebrity status, cast your mind back to the car park of Blanchardstown Shopping Centre in Dublin and the madness that manifested on social media as images of traffic tailbacks, honking horns and unfeasibly long customer queues emerged during the first week of the store’s 24 hour drive-thru opening in September 2018. It was bedlam. But that’s the kind of reaction the doughnuts seem to provoke. Everyone loves Krispy Kreme.
“My time at Krispy Kreme is all anyone wanted to know about at cocktail parties. If I talked about Seaman’s Furniture (he was director of real estate at the furniture chain subsequent to Krispy Kreme), people would move on. But everyone wanted to know about Krispy Kreme,” Mr Lundy says.
“I felt a bit like the only woman on board a ship. I got a lot of attention, my time at Krispy Kreme was probably the most high profile job I’ve had.”
Mr Lundy’s professional career is in real estate, not so much because of an innate desire to buy prime property from the time he could talk, but because the family he married into was looking to acquire sites to expand its gasoline stations’ network and his then father-in-law reckoned he could be the man for the job.
In fact he could have gone down an entirely different route, given the subjects he studied at SUNY, the State University of New York. “Astro physics and English Literature,” he says.
Astro-physics he says was relatively short-lived - three years - before he switched to English Lit, his degree subject.
Ultimately though, his marriage brought the opportunity to work with Gaseteria Oil Corp where he was tasked with finding locations in the New York Metropolitan Area for the expanding gas station network.
“I didn’t know the first thing about real estate but it went really well. I found the locations and negotiated the deals. Gaseteria had about 60 stations when I joined in 1989 and by the time I finished up in the mid-1990s we had 82 stations.
“My brother-in-law subsequently used the seed of that gas estate empire to form a very large development company, Largavista,” Mr Lundy says.
Having honed skills in real estate, Mr Lundy found he had a taste and a talent for it. Over the next few years he worked as real estate director for American fast food chain Wendys, then Krispy Kreme and then Seaman’s Furniture.
Again he identified locations, did his homework on the owner, negotiated deals, including renting and buying. “We rented a lot because real estate prices in New York are astronomical,” he says.
He compares being a real estate agent for Wendys and Krispy Kreme with the role of a gun for hire.
“In those businesses, you are like a mercenary. You know, they’ve got 40 outlets, they want 60. You come in, do the deals and once the target is reached, they don’t need you anymore and you move onto the next role.
“Seaman’s was different in that they wanted hundreds of thousands of square feet of storage space but the others wanted prime sites, like, the equivalent of the corner of St Patrick St.”
So why is Mr Lundy featuring in today’s Property pages? Because he’s got his eyes trained on real estate in Cork city. And in Cork county. He already has two properties under his belt since he arrived here two-an-a-half years ago, one on French Church St and one in Killavullen, near Mallow. And he’s on the lookout for more.
Born in Bethpage, New York in 1964 to John Lundy Snr, from Carlingford, Co Louth and Mary Sheerin, whose folks hail from Gneevguilla, Co Kerry, and whose mother Nora ‘Nonie’ Dan Jack would have been well known in the area, John Junior familiarised himself with Ireland over the years as summers were spent here. He also attended St Joseph’s CBS School in Fairview, Dublin for four years. So he had a good sense of what Ireland was like.
When he retired from real estate work in New York in 2014, fortune made, he thought about where he might go or what he might do next. At age 50, he had plenty left in the tank.
“I could be in Tahiti now if I wanted to be, but I chose Ireland,” he says. Dublin was a bit too like what he was leaving behind, he says, he wanted a more relaxed pace of life, and initially he looked in Wicklow. His sister, Dr Deirdre Lundy “Ireland’s menopause guru”, who lives in Shankill, Co Dublin, works out of the Bray Women’s Health Centre in Wicklow. In the end, he opted for county Cork, Killavullen to be precise, where he bought the 65 acre Carrigacunna Estate in 2018, together with half a mile of prime fishing territory along the River Blackwater “and the longest beech-lived driveway in the Republic of Ireland”.
The estate includes a Georgian manor house, dating to 1864 and a 16th century five-storey castle. It was “in perfect condition physically”, he says, having been lived in prior to that by a UK couple with a background in advertising.
Mr Lundy set about re-purposing it as “a stunning country venue” in North Cork for weddings, with a pricing model that will put it out of reach of most ordinary folk.
“It’s €5,000 a day- and that is just for the venue, it doesn’t cover the cost of caterers or a band or accommodation (there are just four bedrooms, so while they could accommodate the bride and groom, the guests would have to stay elsewhere).
“We are aware that we are targeting the top end of the market, we are not targeting weddings involving 200 guests for €25 a head,” he says.
He says he bought the estate “for a good price” (€1.85m), which includes the half mile of the Blackwater “even though I didn’t know what a gilly was until three years ago”.
However after spending two years getting the estate primed for functions, during which time wedding planner Louise Moran used it as a backdrop for her “Unveiled” wedding bible, Covid-19 hit, putting everything on hold. The one green shoot is in the form of a booking for August 2021, with an American couple planning to hold their wedding celebrations at Carrigacunna.
Down, but not out, Mr Lundy, who declines to reveal his net worth, started looking for more ways of investing his money. He looked at real estate in Cork city and spotted a building for sale at 4 French Church St, in the city’s Huguenot Quarter. He bought it during lockdown for €395,000 from Rob Coughlan of Cohalan Downing.
Drombrook Construction was hired to re-vamp the four-storey building and the ground and first floor are now home to the city’s newest coffee shop, Rebel Coffee. It’s been given the full ‘Rebel’ treatment, from the red and white decor to the painting of “The General”, Michael Collins, which occupies pride of place on the ground floor wall.
Mr Lundy is eyeing up additional Rebel Coffee outlets in two other locations - a site near UCC which he declines to identify, and also an outlet in the nascent North Docklands where new towering developments are springing up at a terrific pace. He would probably rent in these locations, rather than buy, he says. He regards the Docklands as an excellent opportunity.
He’s interested in the city’s bedrock in light of the city authorities’ growing tolerance for more high rise structures. He has been trying to obtain a “sub-surface survey” of the bedrock, but has had no joy to date. He says building in Manhattan is very much informed by the bedrock.
“On the southern tip of Manhattan, you have very high buildings and very deep bedrock. In Soho, there’s no bedrock, so buildings are three or four storeys high. I’m interested in what the bedrock is like in Cork, given it’s built on a swamp.
“ I mean the City Council did approve plans for a 34-storey hotel (on Custom House Quay by Tower Holdings Group), so yeah, I’m interested in what the bedrock is like.” Mr Lundy’s interested for his own sake too in case he ever felt the need to increase the height of that four storey building on French Church St.
Installing a coffee shop there isn’t necessarily the end game.
“Real estate is always a long game. You own a four storey building but maybe you could add storeys. The real play in real estate is development. My brother-in-law made a bigger profit in his first real estate deal (at Largavista) than my father in law made in a year.
“Retail pays the bills on a day to day basis but real estate development is over years and decades. My brother-in-law waited 20 years to get the assemblage he wanted on Northern Boulevard/Queens Boulevard to go up storeys. In the meantime, why not rent it out to retail?”
Mr Lundy believes highrise is Cork city’s future. “You could go outwards rather than up, but your public transport system isn’t good enough. The real potential here is in the city centre and that means going up.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
