Coastal Living: Top tier prices reflect the joy of living by the sea
Coolmain Castle is Munster's 2025 property prize, guided at €7.5m by joint agents Hodnett Forde and Lisney Sotheby's International Realty. Will the Disney family's private retreat attract interest from Stateside?
Irish coastal property has had an appeal for quite some time, since, oh since around the time of the Viking invasion, well over 1,000 years ago.
Not only did the Vikings stay, but they turned small backwaters into major port towns, and even cities such as Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford along the coast, lured by back-up rivers for inland trading and raiding.
Since, we have had the Normans, colonising Saxons, the Spanish came (but didn’t stay) and, more recently, Europeans including Dutch, German, Swiss and French in the post-Cold War period/1960s have been small but important ‘colonising’ influences, rising and falling in strength like the tides, currency and economy swings, but always returning.
Ever since, along with 20th and 21st century hordes of English, increasingly the very upper echelons of the coastal property market are marked by buyers from the US, many of them escaping climate change havoc, and White House mayhem.
It’s not just overseas waves: second home ownership for native Irish has been a ‘thing’ also for decades now, with a surge in the increasingly affluent 1990s and 2000s (with tax breaks in the 1990s for designated seaside resort developments).
Home-born Irish are once more in the ascendant since recovery from the economic and property ‘crash’ period, picking up once more from about 2010 in long-popular locations like Baltimore, Schull and Kinsale (the Vikings' longboats have been replaced with swarming RIBs?) and given an extra oomph since the global pandemic and a lifestyle migration to open spaces, big skies and distant horizons all of five years ago.
According to the Central Statistics Office, non-resident buyers make up between 6% and 10% of Irish residential property purchase, and notably in two key areas: urban, due to employment needs and institutional investors, and ‘lifestyle’ locations in scenic rural and coastal settings in the main.
Some 40% of the Irish population live within 5kms of the coastline, or 2.5m within 10kms of the sea: lucky us.
Prices remain high for properties in proximate reach of lifestyle and coastal settings — despite Munster values being up 10% within the last year and forecast to rise another 5% in the year — what with a strong economy, supply at a 17-year low, and the ongoing if not escalating national love affair with the sea, saunas, surfing, swimming and sipping on lattes and lagers by the ocean.
Ireland has about 3,000 kilometres of coastline to go around, our maybe twice as much, over 7,000 km if you follows every indentation and Muster and the west coast up to Donegal shares the most scenic section of that total.
Waterford kicks it off with likes of Dunmore East, Tramore and Ardmore, while the Cork Waterford border has of course seen UK billionaire James Dyson invest over €30m in the Ballynatray Estate a few miles upriver of Youghal on the River Blackwater, attracted by the land (he’s one of Britain’s largest landowners) and water access.
The spread of demand has hit Ballycotton and lifted it to new heights, with a number of strong results from out-of-county buyers, with €1m barrier breached for Troy House which had been listed at €695,000 by Hegarty Properties who also saw bidding push a derelict boathouse from a €70k ask to €205,000, and who have a dozen new builds in scheme called Ocean Drive priced from €950,000 and have five reserved.
It's reaching Cork harbour homes too, inside and outside the mouth, with a string of high end sales in the likes of Myrtleville and Fountainstown — at least six are in excess of €1m and even humble beach shacks are making €150,000.
Inside the harbour, Cobh is on a rising tide, now a full-time commuter lifestyle location with buyers flocking from all over Ireland and Dublin buyers are keen, metaphorically swapping Kingstown for Queenstown of old, lured by the likes of regular public transport and the sustainability of taking the train to the city.
“We have an immense amount of amenities and services, our lifestyle is refreshing — looking at the harbour every day is like being on your holidays, but most importantly we are only 30 minutes from Cork city and the Airport and I always feel the concept of living on an island 30 mins from Cork city is fascinating,” says local Cobh agent Johanna Murphy who also sells in Kinsale, the kick-off point for the Wild Atlantic Way.
On an international property prize par surely with James Dayson’s Ballynatray has to be the late spring 2025 arrival of Coolmain Castle on the Cork coast between Kinsale and West Cork, with a €7.5 million price tag quoted by joint agents Hodnett Forde and Lisney Sotheby’s International Realty.
With land, and direct water access, Coolmain Castle has been in the Disney family hands for the past 36 years (the late owner Roy Disney’s wealth was put at over €1bn): understandably, there’s only been a select handful of viewings to date, and it remains likely the buyer will be international, very rich and quite possibly a ‘Donald Ducker,’ one of the increasing band of Americans seeking to a sanctuary from Donald Trump’s chaotic regime.
Already, US wealth has swamped Kinsale, with one buyer Jame Berwind so far having laid out over €20m on house purchase assembling a land bank near Sandycove and paying c €5m a pop for a trio of purchases to date.
They however are the headline makers: behind the headlines, overseas buyer are strong in the €1m to €3m+ price range, notes Maeve McCarthy of Skibbereen based Charles P McCarthy who has had a steady stream of sales in that bracket, with a top sale of close to €7m for Glandore’s Kilfinnan Castle back in 2019 … not too far off the €7.5m AMV now for Disney’s Coolmain Castle closer to Cork city and airport and Old Head Golf Course.
Coolmain’s joint agents Andy Donohoe of Hodnett Forde and Eileen Neville also paired up recently with the nearby Kilbrittain Georgian beauty Rathclaren House, largely rebuilt internally to a painstaking standard.
Rathclaren House appeared in these pages within the past month and is currently under offer at the guide of €2.95m “another testament to the growing interest in high-quality coastal properties,” according to Lisney SIR’s Eileen Neville who also had The Mill and Barn in Nohoval (also featured in these pages very recently) near Kinsale and Carrigaline go ‘sale agreed' within a week of going to the market at its €2.25m asking price.
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