The year when billionaires met millionaires in Munster's property market 

They went up more than 10% in a year and by the end of 2024 stood at 13% above the previous, record peak in Tiger-tail swaggering times, April 2007, after a price surge started here during the covid years, and which has shown little sign of abating since.

Not entirely unsurprisingly, earlier this December the Economic and Social Research Institute warned that Irish homes in the main were, now, overvalued by as much as 10%.

Whatever about price growth in the lower middle and ’normal’ market, the very higher end was even frothier, instanced by the remarkable ‘super prime’ price paid for Munster’s Ballynatray estate, which blazed a new, all-time price paid for a private home, likely at €35 million+. And, the spending there only goes on….

At the price, it seem to be the highest price ever paid for an Irish house or estate: it is pipped only by Walford in Dublin, which sold for €58m at ‘the height of the madness’, but that was for development purposes, famously bought by Sean Dunne for €58 million in 2005 and resold to Irish billionaire Dermot Desmond in 2016 for a revised €14.25m, who later sought to demolish and replace it.

NO VACUUM News of ‘blow-in’ UK billionaire and vacuum inventor James Dyson’s purchase of the River Blackwater’s wonderful Ballynatray was exclusively first reported in the Irish Examiner early in 2024: on the Waterford/Cork border, it shows on the Price Register with a Youghal address at €29.25 million, but that excludes the value of much of the wider estate on 850 acres.

As this year winds to a close, the late 1700s era Georgian home is currently under wraps like some very extravagant Christmas gift as millions more euros gets spent on it, with work crews likely to top 100 on-site skilled tradespeople inside and outside.

Dyson’s plans include a heli-pad, privacy enhancing features and other major alterations which he can well afford: his wealth is put at over €20 billion, and his food-focused Dyson Farming holds over 360,000 acres in the UK.

Coming up to 2025, his Irish bolthole remains a building site and hive of activity, getting a third makeover in the past 25 years in its enormously wealthy new owner’s hands.

Ballynatray’s vendor Henry Gwynn Jones had bought the estate and ‘just’ 400 acres in 2003, paying €11 million, later more than doubled his land bank there, running it as a sporting estate.

Some sources suggest Gwynn Jones, who enjoys sailing as well as shootin', would like to now target a Kinsale, West Cork or other coastal base as well as his London residence. If so, he has his pick given his Dyson-funded windfall.

Another billionaire boat owner, one James Berwind, made all the waves in Munster’s high-end property scene during 2024, again widely reported by the Irish Examiner.

Last year, the American heir to a mining fortune and now philanthropist made two Kinsale house swoops which were the Big Sales of ’23, paying €4.5 million+ for the Georgian house Sprayfield on 40 water-fronting acres at Sandycove, and then buying a contemporary Scilly ‘white box’ home, on a height for an even more elevated price of €5.5 million.

Berwind, who visits Kinsale on his €80 million superyacht Scout (recently seen on Sky TV when it covered PGA golf in Bermuda, and who noted the globe-trotting boat is called after his dog Scout), paid a head-scratching €4.99m for a dormer bungalow called Valley House back in Sandycove, whose vendors moved to live in a €1.3m city period semi-d.

Locals say Berwind and his husband plan an animal sanctuary at or near Sprayfield which now, quite incredibly, was seems to be the cheapest of his three multi-million euro Cork/Kinsale purchases to date, and more spending is in the wings…..

WHAT’S NORMAL?

Aside from Mr Berwind’s spree in Kinsale, and James Dyson’s mega sum paid for Ballynatray, can we say it was close to a more ‘normal’ year in the mid to upper-range market in Cork and Munster?

Cork is heading to c 60 sales of houses at or over the €1m million price point during 2024: the Price Register shows over 85 by mid-December.

However, we reckon that c 30 of those were bulk residential sales, of house schemes or apartments/blocks, and that’s pretty close to the €1m+ sales tally in 2023.

Nationwide, there were over 1,200 residential property sales above €1 million, and just over 200 of those made over €2 million.

Meanwhile, more than 60 topped €3m, headed by Ballynatray – which was three times Dublin’s biggest 2024 sales, where two period properties, one in Howth, Censure House (Lisney) and 81 Ailesbury Road (via Sherry FitzGerald) each made €10m.

Cork city and county’s €1m+ tally at c 60 is nearly double the number in this quite rarified atmosphere compared to before covid, when numbers in any one year barely tipped 30.

“There’s been a good shot of sales in Cork city between €1 million and €1.4m during the year just ending,” says head of Sherry FitzGerald’s Cork office Ann O’Mahony, who had six sales over €1m during the year.

Theirs are headed by the €2.1m paid for Riverside, a Georgian gem on Castle Road, Blackrock, going well over its €1.65m AMV.

Riverside was followed by Creighton, a detached on Maryborough Hill €1.46 million, while Douglas also yielded two more, Anward on Woodview at €1.345m and Randall on the Well Road at €1.27m, or an even IR£1m in ‘the old money.’ Going a bit outside the old city and ‘burbs, Sherry FitzGerald topped the €1m mark in Ballincollig getting €1.05m for 1 Woodbury, while a Fernwalk home, No 40, came close too, at €960,000.

At Cobh, Sherry FitzGerald got €1.35m, for Ballymore Lodge, a five bed period property on ten acres, and Savills got €1.33m for Carrigmore House on Cobh’s Lake Road.

Around Mideton, the €1m barrier was breached by agent James Colbert for Capri Lodge. a contemporary home by a stream built by  a nephew of GAA legend Christy Ring: result. 

Top Cork city sale of 2024 was achieved by another of the big, national agencies, Savills, who got a recorded, even €3 million for Kennitt House, a stunner inside and outside dating to the first half of the 1900s, bought by a family with special requirements.

The 6,100 sq ft exceptionally private home went for sale in 2020, guiding €3.2m with another agency, and at €3m is the strongest price for a city or suburban home since the mid 2000s Celtic Tiger times, when a record of c €5m was set in Sunday’s Well.

Douglas alone had over ten €10m sales during 2024, including at least two new builds, Inish on the Well Road for €1.2m and 9 Hettyfield Gardens, at €1.079m, both via Savills, who also had most of the new in the Orchard Road development Ecklinville sell in 2024, at price from €1.28m to €1.5 million: they have No 3, the showhouse there currently on offer at €1.45 million.

NEW BUILDS Totting up Savills’ 19 sales in excess of €1m was salutary in that well over half were for brand new builds…add in other location scoring €1m+ for new builds like Kinsale that’s a lot of home hunting families with this sort of once-exalted sum to spend satisfied in 2024.

Just further out, new-builds had previously also topped €1m at Vailima on the Model Farm Road: more are yet to surface on the Register, eg at next door’s Merton Lodge site, where the largest of 18 new homes was priced at €1.3m by Sherry FitzGerald.

Near Merton, Little Orchard on Farranlea Road fell just short of its €1.1 m guide, via Cohalan Dowing, making €975,000, while Cohalan Downing went just over the mark at Parklands, the house at the old Rathcooney fruit farm, which made €1.03 million.

The Register shows 21 Cork sales over €2m but over half were bulk sales, so less than ten over the €2m mark were genuine one-off house transactions.

The majority at €2m+ were country, coastal, West Cork or Kinsale sales, predictably enough, as only a handful in the city went this strong.

Making the top three over €2m, along with Kennitt House in Rochestown (€3m) and Riverside on Castle Road Blackrock at €2.1m is Sans Souci, a ‘replacement’, contemporary build on the main Douglas Road, sale agreed at c €2.2m via estate agent Patricia Stokes but it has yet to appear on the Price Register for price check purposes.

Sans Souci was one of three absolutely cracking Cork city homes Trish Stokes had listed in summer 2024, one week after another after a fairly flat summer for listings so the better heeled home hunter suddenly had choice, in Douglas (where the same agent also sold Cloncarrig, a modern house in Douglas Lawn for €1.1m) and Blackrock and she also has sold Sunnyside on the main Blackrock Road by Barrington’s Avenue for around its €1.75m AMV, also yet to surface on the Price Register. Her third listing, also on the main Blackrock Road, may well feature in these pages in a year’s time….if not a lot sooner.

Selling too in the Blackrock area was No 56 Lindville, making €1.4 m, likely to be an off market sale or asset transfer, while No 44 Lindville sold for €1m, via Savills.

Blackrock also pretty much bagged another Cork record when a luxury apartment No 16 Blackrock House in the former Ursuline Convent sold above guide for €1.35m via agents Lisney Sotheby’s International Real Estate making it one of the most expensive apartment sales in the city. Lisney previously got €1m for an apartment No 19 in the Lancaster Gate scheme, back in 2020.

SKY HIGH?

The most expensive apartment sold in Cork is likely the one at the tippy-top of the Elsyian tower next to City Hall, sold right back in 2008 for about €2m, prior to Price Register transparency (most Elysian units are now owned by Kennedy Wilson.) The first ever resale of an Elysian apartment took place this year:

 No 108, a c 1,500 sq ft three beds came to market in July ’24 guiding €825,000 and is understood to have made just over that, via Sherry FitzGerald/ Lisney also sold the characterful Kinsale Fisherman’s Hall in jig time for over its asking, making €1.25m, and got a bit over that, €1.35m for the quirky Villa Lilla in Sneem, Kerry.

The first ‘big’ Cork city sale of 2024 showing on the Price Register was that of Eglantine, a detached bungalow on lovely grounds just off the Blackrock Road on Crab Lane, making bang on €1 million with Timothy Sullivan, leading the charge for the wider Blackrock area’s quite modest-size clutch of biggies, which included 3 Park villas on Victoria Road, which made €1.3m via Savills, understood to be to a family relocating from Kinsale.

Likely to be a massive headline grabber for Blackrock – but, now in 2025, not ’24 - will be the sale of the SMA’s religious order’s house Feltrim at the city end of the Blackrock Road. Feltrim is selling for development it seems as it’s on three acres, at while it’s making a reported €6m, the value on the Register when it appears may be less, reflecting the house value plus an acre only.

Making €1.25m and a price record for its location was Lynbar, No 7 Shrewsbury Downs off the Ballinlough Road, selling via agent Kevin Barry, and Barry Auctioneers also topped ‘the big note’ in Clarkes Wood Mount Oval and Rochestown, getting €1.05m and €1.1 million for Nos 16 and 17 respectively.

OUT OF TOWN Away from the city, West Cork and Kinsale dominated the big property sales in Cork, only rivalled by the mother of all sale, the previously mentioned Ballynatray at €35m+ in East Cork/West Waterford, with rivalries if not land wars seemingly in who claims the record (the Register has it in Cork/Youghal, but officially it’s Waterford?

Kinsale had at least a dozen €1m+ sales, headed by Valley House in Sandycove at €4.99m, a James Berwind buy to add to the billionaire’s stockpiling stable, and the 2023 sale of Seaspray at Scilly’s Seaspray at €5.5m surfaces on the 2024 Register too, sold by Inhaus.

Agent Brendan Bowe got €1.4 million for a period home Bellevue House at the Ramparts, as well as hitting €1.05m for Shippool Lodge up the river Bandon toward Innishannon and says there’s “a queue of €1 million plus sales waiting to close in the New Year,” mentioning the ‘Kinsale Pull effect’ spreading out in ripples past the town and shoreline.

A modern home called Over Yonder at Ardbrack, Kinsale shows at €2.9m, sold by Sheehy Brothers, and Savills got an unconfirmed c €1.6m for Harvel House at Oysterhaven. Meanwhile, Engel & Volkers sold a sprawling bungalow right by the water at Oysterhaven for €2.4 million.

Engel & Volkers also got €1.35m for a terraced home at 6 Fr MacSweeney Terrace, just where Kinsale’s Scilly meet Ardbrack while the Kinsale ripple affect has as we noted before often stretched to Nohoval, on the east, and towards Clonakilty to the west, as E&V also sold Ard Alainn, Kilbrittain, for a recorded €1.3m, and Hodnett Forde got €966k for Padley, a modern home on spectacular gardens.

Performing as well as Kinsale was that other Cork/Munster property hot-spot stalwart, West Cork, with some stand-out huge prices again paid, especially for coastal homes (two on the Coast Road in Fountaintown south Cork just tipped over the €1m mark, Confusion at €1.05m and Ring of Bright Water at €1.095m.) Having said that, a relatively inland one, Atlas House near Ballinscarthy bucked the demand trend for water views: a 4,200 sq ft house with 200 year old roots and very private, it sold to US-based buyers for €1.55m via Hodnett Forde having had both UK and US interest.

With water vistas near Glandore was Tir na nOg, a modern four-bed home overlooking the harbour, sold off-market for a Dublin family for a recorded €2.25 million, via joint agents Chas P McCarthy and Hodnett Forde, with the former also selling the charming Raheen Castle and quality, farmhouse-style home at Reen, by Union Hall/Castletownshend for €1.775m.

Skib-based McCarthys also sold Windswept Cottage, Reen, facing the harbour and Castletownshend for a recorded €1.08m, under its €1.2m guide, as well as selling The Slipway, Cove at Baltimore at €1.375m.

Glengarriff seems to have had ‘just’ two properties top €1m in 2024, Monks Glen at Gerald and The Courtyard at €1.195, both listed with Sherry FitzGerald Country/ Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill.

But, of all of the €1 million+ plus sales, surely the big surprise of 2024 was the big price paid for arguably the smallest of all of the region’s romantic listings, Fisherman’s Cottage at Simon’s Cove near Clonakilty.

A pair of old stone cottage, one 700 sq ft, the other 1,200 sq ft on two acres with beach access floated here in June with the heading ‘Tiny West Cork paradise comes at a big, big price: try €1.5m for size.’ Well, it was tried, tested and taken, bought after a short and furious bidding battle between a UK party and two from the US.

At the price it did seem like no Irish would apply: in fact, any expectation it might even be worth €1m was met with disbelief and even crossness by locals, increasingly edged and elbowed out of areas they feel they may have a birthright to… It was bought by an American family who indtend to relcoated fulltie, say Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill, saying “it got endless interest, people just fell in love with it. The laws of attraction applied.”