Housebuilders Menolly and Ballymore are to build 4,000 homes on 450 acres in north Dublin. Property Editor Jack Fagan reports
About 4,000 homes planned for the former Baldoyle racecourse and an adjoining 100-acre site in Portmarnock are to be built on a joint venture basis by two development companies, Ballymore Properties and Menolly Homes.
The new arrangement, formally agreed yesterday after months of negotiations, will clear the way for Menolly's principal, Mr Seamus Ross, to acquire a 50 per cent stake in the two companies controlling the sites at a cost of €95 million.
The two landbanks have been owned for about a decade by Mr Sean Mulryan's international property group Ballymore.
The deal puts a combined value of €180 million on the 450 acres which are considered the best available development lands on the north Dublin coast.
The Portmarnock site is already serviced by a DART station and it is planned to open a second station at Baldoyle when the old racecourse has been redeveloped.
The landbank straddles the north fringe where over the next 10 years a further 7,000 homes are to be built on land owned by Gannon Homes and Shannon Homes.
A new town centre to be strategically located in the centre of the new district will support a population of up to 20,000. The town centre will have a mixture of commercial, retail, leisure and sporting facilities as well as two hotels, a church, Garda station and health and social amenities.
There will also be a range of bars and restaurants located close to the DART stations.
A new underpass to be built under the Dublin-Belfast railway line will link the town centre facilities on the Baldoyle site with those on the Gannon lands.
Both the Baldoyle and Portmarnock sites will have superb coastal views and vast areas of open space.
The Baldoyle land will have about 250 acres of parkland, much of it running along the front of the site from Baldoyle village to Portmarnock Bridge. A further 100 acres has been set aside for about 2,500 homes, the majority of them two, three and four-bedroom houses.
There will also be a good mixture of apartments and duplex units, some of them in six-storey blocks with views over the coastline to Ireland's Eye.
Development work is expected to begin on the Baldoyle site early next year and the first 400 homes are likely to come on the market before next summer.
The zoning will allow about 1,400 homes to be developed on 100 acres of the Portmarnock land.
A big proportion of the units will be large executive type houses aimed at the top end of the market.
Baldoyle Racecourse was bought by property developer John Byrne after it closed in 1972. There was then a reasonable expectation that it would be redeveloped for housing but several attempts by his company, Endcamp Ltd, to have it rezoned were turned down by Dublin City Council.
In 1991 Pennine Holdings, a company that included the lobbyist Frank Dunlop, acquired an option on the land but it also failed to have it rezoned.
Mr Mulryan's acquisition of the land in the mid-1990s for a figure thought be around €30 million coincided with a broadly-based campaign to have more land made available for housing. The move also coincided with the extension of the DART service to Malahide. His timing was perfect and in due course both the Baldoyle and Portmarnock lands were rezoned.
In recent years Mr Mulryan has been focusing primarily on the London market where Ballymore is now one of the largest developers of apartments in the city. It is presently completing New Providence Wharf, a massive development that includes over 700 apartments, a high quality hotel hotel and offices.
Menolly is by far one of the most prolific housebuilders in the Dublin area and is currently involved in 10 separate sites. The company has just begun development work on 800 new housing units on a site adjoining the Baldoyle land which was acquired along with partners Killoe Developments from Gannon Homes.
The deal was worth more than €60 million. Menolly is expected to complete more than 2,000 new homes in the Dublin area next year.
