Property

BidX1’s April Irish property auction: Slim pickings for bargain hunters

Penthouse next to ruins of 13th-century friary among online sale’s more unusual lots

Cashel penthouse: how did the apartment, which has an €80,000 reserve, get through the planning process?

Thu Mar 28 2019 - 00:00

BidX1’s next property auction, on Thursday, April 4th, features the usual mix of urban apartments, suburban semis and rural homes in less than peak condition, many with disclosed reserves of less than €100,000.

These days, however, you won't find too many out-and-out bargains. The online auction has, in previous years, seen some high-quality lots snapped up at low prices by predominantly cash buyers, but the market has more than corrected itself, and it's easy to imagine the reserve prices in this auction being surpassed.

Property prospectors may be disappointed with the 146 or so lots, which include about 40 commercial lots. There are out-of-town warehouses, some boom-era holiday homes and a clutch of country-town takeaways.

There are some standouts, including five modern two-bedroom apartments in Eaglewood, a well-kept gated development on Rochestown Avenue in Dún Laoghaire, in south Co Dublin.

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Eaglewood was built around 2001, in the grounds of an attractive 18th-century house that faces Johnstown Road. It’s a well-thought-out scheme of spacious, tall-windowed, nicely laid-out apartments with balconies and communal gardens. The reserve price is €1.45 million for the five units. Two-bedroom apartments here typically rent for about €1,800 a month.

Across the city in Lucan, in west Co Dublin, a lot of five apartments and two semi-detached houses is guided similarly at €1.5 million. At the other end of the price scale, a former traditional pub building extending to 475sq m, in the village of Eyrecourt, in Co Galway, is guided at just €50,000.

One of the more unusual lots is a two-bedroom penthouse in a development in Cashel, in Co Tipperary, which carries a reserve of €80,000. The scheme has striking views of the ruins of a Dominican friary dating back to 1243. You have to wonder how it got through the planning process in the first place, but no doubt it has great potential as a holiday let with history on its doorstep.

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