Pedigree beats pandemic as Cork house sells 50% above launch price

Property market soldiers on in spite of Covid-19

Ashton Park House sold for €1.825m.

PANDEMIC? What pandemic?

More than six months into the altered reality of Covid-19, the property market continues to soldier on — with startling evidence of the emotional search for home comforts, especially at the top end of the business.

Witness the swift sale, in distressing coronavirus times, of Cork’s Ashton Park House, which has just sold for €1.825m, more than 50% higher than its launch price as recently as summer this year.

It came to a clearly nervous, virus-stricken market with a guide of €1.25m quoted by agents Cohalan Downing at the start of June.

That was just as the country came out of its first lockdown period from March, and property observers wondered ‘could it shift?’. It has shifted, plenty.

The fine, clearly up-market city home got as many as 20 enquiries and more than a handful of bidders. 

“A number chased it in excess of its guide price,” says auctioneer Brian Olden of Cohalan Downing, and, clearly, two at least went much further.

Market sources who’d been watching its progress (it was one of several city homes to come to the summer market in excess of €1m, and deals are already agreed on at least two others) say that it breached €1.75m and even €1.8m.

“I can’t confirm the price, or the buyer’s identity, obviously. All I can say is the seller and the purchaser were both extremely happy with the outcome,” said Mr Olden, despite the Price Register this week showing it at €1.825m.

Ashton Park House is one of Cork’s best houses, as the market so clearly endorses.

When it last sold, back in 1997 with the same agent too, it made Ir£350,000 (€440,000) which was a then price record for the city.

Although higher prices were paid in Celtic Tiger times for Cork pads (think €5m in Sunday’s Well), Ashton Park House has again surpassed itself, especially in times of economic nervousness.

One of the interior shots of Ashton Park House.

Asked about the bold decision to put it to the open market in June 2020, CDA agent Brian Olden said: “I told my client that it was such a quality house, that if it was put for sale at a time like this, when there was no competition out there, that if there was a buyer out there, they would buy it.” 

Well, it turns out that there were in fact several putative buyers well into the €1.25m+ price level as he added the oft-familiar auctioneers’ trope “there were a number of disappointed underbidders". 

The 1918-built Ashton Park House of about 4,000 sq ft on a half-acre at the city end of the city’s Blackrock Road property hot-spot, accommodated its owners for 23 years. It made a full p1 pictorial splash in the Irish Examiner’s property pages on June 6, while the publication ran in temporary Covid-days broadsheet format.

Before its fortunate owners put their home up for sale, they first sold off a site in its grounds for c€500,000; they also kept a further garden section for themselves for a replacement 'trade-down' house, which they’ve already built.

Pandemic woes? You could say the vendors are laughing all the way …to the back garden.