Kinsale home goes for €5.5m — a new price record for the Cork town

Constantia Farm, Kinsale

Munster’s property hot-spot, Kinsale, has a new crowning glory in high-end house price stakes.

A six-year-old home built on the top of Compass Hill overlooking the town and harbour has made up to €5.5m, a new price record for the town where multi-million euro sales are nearly ten a penny.

In a league of its own in terms of attraction to super-wealthy home hunters, Kinsale is heading up to 50 individual €1m+ property sales since 2010, a record unsurpassed outside of any location outside of the Dublin catchment.

Just changed hands is Kinsale’s Constantia Farm, a 4,000 sq ft family home on 27 elevated acres which had been sold off by the Mercy Order as unzoned land back in 2012 for €450,000.

Planning was later granted for a single ‘farmhouse’ dwelling, and the completed house came to market a year ago with local agents Sheehy Brothers, with an undisclosed price tag put by local sources at €5m: it is understood to have sold for even more than that figure after some protracted negotiations.

Constantia Farm Kinsale

With a high-end architect-designed home completed there on the 27 acres of pasture, with 1.5 acres of garden with rose-lined approach avenue, the property has already jumped more than ten-fold in value.

And, the completed sale at c €5.5m has significantly eclipsed the €4.75m paid earlier this year for Kinsale’s Raffeen House, a period house on the harbour water’s edge at Scilly which was sold by entrepreneur Colm O’Sullivan, the ‘Sully’ of Cully & Sully food brand renown, to a US-based buyer.

Raffeen House in Scilly made €4.75 million last year setting Kinsale's previous record.

In contrast, Constantia Farm has been picked up as a full-time family pad by a home-grown Cork entrepreneur in the tech and communications sphere. It is understood that he netted a very significant multi-million euro windfall as a major shareholder when the firm he had created merged earlier this year with a US giant to combine for a company with annual sales of €100m, according to Bloomberg reports in March.

He is due to make the move to Kinsale from a home in West Cork he had bought around 2015.

By a slight coincidence, the vendors of Constantia Farm — the Bendon family — had also moved to Kinsale’s Compass Hill having lived in another Munster gilded property location, Glandore, where they had founded Glenmar Seafood. That was later sold to Lisavaird Coop, sort of adding to the Kinsale high-end property market profile of individuals gaining handsomely from company sales, mergers and takeovers.

For those recently enriched, and who have just missed out this time around at Constantia Farm, Kinsale still has Oceanbreeze listed at Scilly for €5m, and the 14-bed niche hospitality venue Ballinacurra House upriver of the town, on 20 acres at €6.35m. The house is where Michael Jackson secretly stayed for several months with his children, away from prying eyes.

This house, at the southern end of Constantia Farm’s 27 green acres above Compass Hill’s Georgian Dromderrig House, is hardly your standard common or garden farmhouse.

At the €5m+ price point, it runs to an almost-modest 4,000 sq ft and was designed by West Cork architect Geraldine Coughlan. It has sliding doors opening to large balconies and patios, landscaped gardens, a sunken patio, fire pit, barbecue area, double garage and a rose-lined approach avenue.

The price paid equates to €1,300 per square foot, give or take, excluding the value of the land on the very top of Compass Hill, which may ultimately rise in further value if ever rezoned.