Scoop up an ice cream parlour, café/deli and artisan food store for €450,000 in lovely Ballycotton
The Trawl Door, Ballycotton
THE Trawl Door, the kind of enterprise every upstanding coastal village should have, has been placed on the market for €450,000, after its owners, Joan and Seán Paul, decided to permanently retire their ice cream scoops.
The 1700 sq ft premises, with a quaint and colourful shopfront and a thriving AirBnB overhead, started out as two residential houses in the late 1800s, but has long been a commercial premises.
The Paul’s bought it 15 years ago when it was the local grocery store and post office and subsequently reinvented it, installing a café/deli/artisan food store in the grocery section and an ice cream parlour where the post office had been.
They lived in overhead accommodation for four years, before buying a house further along Main Street.
“We rent it out as an AirBnB and the annual income is c€28,000,” Ms Paul said.
She said it does “really well, and if I had 10 of them, I could rent them all”, such is the demand in Ballycotton, which has undergone a major shake-up since the return of local-turned-millionaire-businessman Pearse Flynn, who is behind the successful Sea Church live music venue/restaurant in the village, and who owns Cush, which won a Michelin Bib Gourmand earlier this year.
Ms Paul said the AirBnB does well all year and is regularly rented over the winter months by students attending nearby Ballymaloe Cookery School. The ice cream parlour becomes a gift shop during winter, and does “fantastically well” at Christmas, selling local produce, arts and crafts.
Ms Paul does all the home cooking for the deli, selling largely gluten-free products, for which customers travel from Cork city and Limerick.
She says the shop has a monopoly in the village, because there is “nowhere else” site-wise, to open another. “In the 15 years we’ve been here, no-one has done it,” she says.
Ms Paul says they put a lot into the business and that “it makes a lot of money”, but she and her husband have decided to retire to spend more time with family.
She reckons The Trawl Door is ideally suited to a younger person/couple with the energy and enthusiasm to run a good business.
“It’s a great business for the right person,” she says “and I think it’s a fair price.” The selling agent is Adrianna Hegarty and she says it’s “a gorgeous property, a real seaside shop, with lovely living quarters, in the form of a self-contained two-bed apartment with an open plan living space and a first floor decking area to the rear".
Ms Hegarty also points out that Ballycotton is moving up the tourist charts, popular for fishing, tours of its iconic lighthouse, well known cliff walks, nearby beaches, Sea Church and Cush.
Ballycotton is just 15km from Midleton and 38 kms from Cork city.
More information: Adrianna Hegarty at Hegarty Properties Tel: 021 463 9411
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