'Fenway' will knock your 'Sox' off on Blackrock Road

Tommy Barker says there's no letting up on demand for houses in this location, for those who can afford it

Fri, 11 Sep, 2020 - 12:00

THE Cork property market might be expected to slow down a bit between now and Christmas, what with seasonality and Covid-19 and concerns over the country officially entering a recession, but it seems there’s no let-up in demand for spots like the city’s Blackrock Road… among those who can afford it, at least.

Case in point was the instant surge of interest this week alone in a new listing, an old-fashioned bungalow called Kilcash which graced these pages on Saturday of last week.

The mature beech tree at its entrance to 'Fenway'.

Pretty much a total do-er up, the 1,600 sq ft E2 rated Kilcash, facing Cleve Hill, carries a €380,000 AMV with estate agent Timothy Sullivan. By Wednesday of this week, he had received 50 requests to view, and could quite reasonably see another €100,000-€200,000 spent on it if it’s not even knocked down and replaced, given it’s on a lovely site, south-aspected to the back.

Fifty viewings? And, obviously, due to Covid-19 restrictions, all those parties will have to come one at a time, that’s some amount of hopeful home-hunter foot-traffic.

Now, to compound Mr Sullivan’s next few busy weeks at Kilcash comes Fenway, a nearly 60-year old semi-detached family home called after the sport home of the Boston RedSox, Fenway Park, and which carries the alternative address 1 Cleve Hill.

One of the few Cleve Hill estate homes facing directly onto the main Blackrock Road, it’s in good overall condition, has a side addition with further scope, carries a ‘premium’ address for those for whom these things matter, and is priced at €415,000.

Given its attributes and the evident interest across the way in Kilcash, it might be reasonable to suspect it will go higher in bids.

No 1 Cleve hill, aka Fenway, featured here in back in 2009, when it had been offered for sale in a recession-weakening market (yes, the ‘last’ recession, the very long one) by Tim Sullivan with then-joint agents Savills with a €5500,000 price tag.

By 2012, Fenway’s asking price was reduced to €405,000 according to our records, and then the owners decided to take it off the market, so it returns in 2020 after an eight-year hiatus, pretty much in the same price bracket, with its final selling price yet to be seen.

Cleve Hill homes were designed and built by doyen Cork architect Frank Murphy in the mid-1900s, and he and his family held on to a number of them for decades, with a number of them slowly selling on, one-by-one over the past two decades.

No 1 Cleve Hill was one of the first the family sold, about 20 years ago.

Since then, the next generation of the Murphy family got a far larger windfall when undeveloped land north of Cleve Hill, overlooking Monahan Road, sold to Howard Holdings for €10.7 million for about six acres.

That land got resold at least twice, and developers Citidwell ending up building 31 up-market homes here by 2017/18, in a Cleve Hill setting they called Botanika, with the bigger c 2,400 sq ft Botanika detacheds making prices around €850,000.

Looking down Cleve Hill towards the Botanika development in Blackrock, Cork. Picture Dan Linehan

Excluding Botanika new sales, the Price Register shows six Cleve Hill resales since 2013, at prices steadily escalating from €295,000 to the latest posting, in 2019, at €560,000.

Coincidentally, both of those price extremes were set by No 4 Cleve Hill, which got an overhaul in the interim. Other semi-ds here have had major extensions added in the past decade, some more than doubling in size.

No 1 was extended to the side, at the ground floor only, around the early 2000s, and now has about 1,500 sq ft.

As the bedroom headcount was reduced to three from four, to make for an en-suite main bedroom, plus a better bathroom with a sunken bath, next owners might want to look at using a ground floor room as a guest/fourth bedroom.

Stairway to heaven? The bedroom headcount was reduced from four to three.

Others too may look at further extensions, from the easy enough option of making the side wing a full two-storey, to something perhaps even more elaborate.

After the last reconfiguration, the main reception room going front to back of 23’ by 13’ was fashioned, and other rooms include a lounge, study/bed four, kitchen, and utility.

Marked by the presence of a mature beech tree at its entrance on the main road, south-facing Fenway has off-street parking, and mature gardens stepped down to the back.

VERDICT: Demand for houses in the locale seems to be knocked out of the park — Fenway Park.