Irish lead the hunt for country houses

Locals, not foreign buyers, fuel demand for period homes in the country. Rose Doyle reports

THOSE at the selling coalface are unanimous; it's been a good year for country house sales. Agents around the country also agree that the prospects are every bit as promising for the year ahead.

They agree, too, about trends which have become established facts of the market. Good-sized, period houses in need of refurbishment are in very short supply and much sought-after. It's also true that American, German and even English buyers have forsaken the search for an Irish rural retreat for sunnier climes, and cheaper living, on the Continent.

Youngish Irish buyers making a reasonable killing on, most often, a southside Dublin home, still account for a large number of buyers. They often seek something characterful, period and in need of refurbishment. Irish urbanites nearing retirement account for a good number of buyers too. Usually they've got a family home worth selling and are looking for a smaller, trouble-free, refurbished house on no more than a couple of acres.

Robert Hoban looks after country sales at Hamilton Osborne King which hit the jackpot with the €8.2 million late spring sale of Landenstown Estate at Sallins in Co Kildare. The large Georgian house has 330 acres of land. Hoban says it's rare for such houses to be bought simply for development purposes.

Around 60 per cent of Hoban's customers come from Dublin, he says, and he confirms the shortage of houses needing work. "A lot of people put money into country houses in the 1980s and 1990s so most coming for sale now have already been done up."

Good buys are still possible: HOK recently sold Glebe House, Strokestown, Co Roscommon, for around €750,000. Originally part of the Strokestown demesne, the cut-stone property measures about 279sq m (3,000sq ft) and was in need of TLC.

Harriet Grant of Ganly Walters was clearly half in love with Glen Lodge, a Georgian house "sitting on the bay at Strandhill with a boathouse, and an ancient glen on its 32 acres. It had been empty for 10 years and was in need of refurbishment."

Owned by the widow of an American Yeatsian scholar, who bought it a decade ago so as to scatter her dead husband's ashes in Sligo, Glen Lodge sold for €2.2 million in February. Rare and wonderful, it's typical of the "piece of charm" Grant says is in demand again and in rare supply.

In rare supply, too, are English, German and American buyers, all of them "going to mainland Europe for the weather and because of the cost of living in Ireland".

There's agreement, too, that Dublin buyers aren't keen to spend more than an hour commuting. Ciara Slattery of Warren Estates in Gorey says potential buyers feel that "an hour's travel twice a day is do-able but anything longer is not. The benefits of the opened-up M50 have only started to kick in over the last six months." Warren, too, has found, "a lot of nice, bigger old houses are being bought by south Dublin people nearing retirement age". A farmhouse in need of work, on the Blackwater with 60 acres, sold well during the year for €1.8 million. Ganly Walters found that houses in Westmeath and Offaly sold mostly to local people. They sold Wardenstown House, Kilcullen, Co Westmeath, a Georgian house on 76 acres plus cottage which needed "up-lifting", for €2.3 million. "There's a lot of money in Ireland," Harriet Grant says, "and it's not all in Dublin!"

West Cork "is still going well", says Maeve McCarthy of Charlie McCarthy Auctioneers in Skibbereen, a family firm. "The cachet of having a house in west Cork still exists, regardless of cheaper property in Spain and Croatia. People still fancy the great lifestyle."

She's immodestly enthusiastic about the appeal of the area's "big, eclectic artisan community" and put her money where her mouth is, too, when she moved back to west Cork from a "frantic" life in Dublin. Commuting is not a problem in west Cork, she says.

"I'm showing property to someone who's going to commute from London," she says.

In west Cork, too, the buyer profile has changed. While most, in the 1970s and 1980s, were Dutch or American buyers, these days they mainly come from Dublin or England. Unique houses do come up for sale: Maeve McCarthy cites Durrus Court, just outside Durrus. An old hunting lodge, with the ruins of a 16th century fortified house on its grounds, it has a price tag of €1.3 million. The picture is a little different on the lower east coast. New Irish buyers, says Phillip Carton of PNO Gorman in New Ross, "are buying period country houses as their homes for life so these are not coming back onto the market. Dublin buyers definitely don't want to commute as far as New Ross, we get more weekend-house buyers. "

He cites the case of the lovely, cut-stone Castle House, four miles from Graiguenamanagh, Co Kilkenny, restored in the last eight years by its American owner. The houseon 12 acres in the Barrow Valley is on the market for €670,000.

"This year was good and the forecast is good as well," says Edward Townsend of Colliers Jackson-Stops. "When an unrefurbished, period house comes onto the market it makes big money because of the shortage. "