Three Cork houses on Blackrock Road’s Millionaires Row go to auction for €1.4m

Three houses on Cork’s prestigious Blackrock Road and the long-troubled Ashley estate return to auction with €2.64m guides

Three Cork suburban detached Lindville houses needing  remediation/refurb, and four more detacheds needing work plus two sites also on the city's upmarket Rochestown Road are to be offered by auction at reflectively low guide prices. Pictures: Larry Cummins

‘THREE houses for the price of one’ on Cork City’s ‘Millionaires Row’, Lindville on the Blackrock Road, have come for sale by auction in October.

Listed with online auction platform Youbid.ie are the three detached numbers 27 and 28 Lindville, as well as no 53 Lindville, built in the 1990s.

The three houses carry a combined guide price of €1.4m.

27 and  28 Lindville.  Picture Larry Cummins

Two are vacant and need work, while No 28 is rented at a current rent of €1,800, well under the current average Irish new rent figure of €2,200.

Delivered in the 1990s on the site of a former private psychiatric hospital in deep suburban Ballintemple and at the city end of the Blackrock Road, Lindville was on its launch, and remains, one of Cork’s ‘aspirational’ trade up family-friendly addresses.

Some of the larger houses on the Blackrock Road would sell for over €2m today.

53 Lindville

Designed to a repro-Victorian era styling in tune with a number of Blackrock Road period originals, at least five individual Lindville homes have sold for over €1m, the most recent three selling individually (for over €3.6m if combined) in 2024 and 2025.

The most recent Lindville sale was of an extended semi-detached, No 17, for €1.225m.

Two have made €1.4m or more — the guide price for this October’s triple offering as one lot — in the past two years alone.

No 59 sold for €1.45m in 2023, and No 56 for €1.4m in 2024.

The three now being offered, nos 27, 28, and 53, for online auction on October 16 via the platform Youbid.ie are likely to be associated with original Lindville developers Croft Park, headed by members of the O’Connor family, with that company going into liquidation in the late 1990s with a number of the 60+ Lindville homes needing completion by other builders on behalf of purchasers.

Adjacent nos 27 and 28 are at the very back end of Lindville, facing north over the Marina Park and Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

Ashley scheme

Meanwhile, also associated with the O’Connor family was the Ashley development on the Rochestown Roa with just one of five large Arts and Crafts-style homes completed by 2008 before also getting into financial difficulties.

Four luxury detached homes remain vacant on the Rochestown Road, Cork. The homes were close to completion but have remained unfinished for years despite high property demand in this area of the city.  The ghost estate featured last year in The New York Times in an article about dereliction in Ireland. Pic: Larry Cummins default

Ashley has largely remained a ‘ghost estate’ ever since.

An effort to auction four Ashley houses prior to last Christmas with a combined AMV of €1.24m was attempted by Youbid.ie, and they were heavily viewed nine months ago, primarily by builders as all needed remedial work.

However, a separate offer of two sites was subsequently advertised within the Ashley scheme but which was not associated with receivers, thus possibly colouring the auction picture — nothing sold.

Now a second a

Ashley, where four houses and two sites are now to be auctioned from a €1.24m AMV. Picture:  Dan Linehan

ttempt to sell the unfinished Ashley scheme is being made, with a fresh auction date of October 5, 2025, advertised by the online auction platform, to include four houses and the two sites.

All are guided now at the same ‘entry’ price sum of €1.24m.

The sole completed Ashley house was briefly up for sale in 2008 with a €1.3m price tag.

If the two October auction sales go through, at combined guides totalling €2.64m+ for seven detached houses — three at Lindville, four at Ashley — and two development sites, it may mark the end of a saga with 30-year and 20-year backdrops... in two of Cork City’s most affluent suburbs.

Then, they all need significant rehabilitation and remedial works to get them up to comfortable living standards, on a par with their neighbourhoods.