Sean Dunne casts shadow over Ballsbridge

The irony cannot have been lost on some of the 360 people who attended this week’s Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland annual conference. Much of its focus was on plotting the way forward for the property market without repeating the mistakes of the recent past, which as we all know led to a crash from which some parts of the Republic are at last beginning to make a decent recovery.

The meeting took place in the Ballsbridge Hotel in Dublin, still colloquially known as Jurys even though it no longer has any connection with that group. The reason is, of course, that developer Seán Dunne bought both it and the adjacent Berkeley Court from Jurys for €310 million in 2005, paying a then record €57 million an acre.

He passed that benchmark in style shortly afterwards by paying €130 million for nearby Hume House, valuing the site at an eye-watering €197 million an acre. He was going to knock the hotels and replace them with a high-rise residential and commercial complex, a proposal that made it through planning in only a very diluted form five years later.

Nine years on from the deal, Dunne is out of the picture and the hotels are still there, on the face of it doing a reasonable business. That includes hosting conferences with an emphasis on avoiding recreating the environment where everyone, from British and Icelandic banks to the man on the street, believed an acre of real estate in Dublin was worth €57 million, much less €197 million.

It is probably worth noting that Dunne is a qualified quantity surveyor and worked in the field before moving into property developing. Obviously he was one member of the profession who was not there on Thursday.