Ranelagh quietly readjusts to market reality

Dublin NeighbourhoodsIts prime location and Luas factor pushed prices to record levels but now Ranelagh values are stabilising, says Kevin O'Connor.

When I came here, 30 years ago, Ranelagh was a rundown area of Victorian redbricks. Many of the houses were in bedsits, presided over by the last of the landladies who took PGs (paying guests).

The last of the landladies went to her just reward, from whence she presides over a generation of entrepreneurs and policy makers, for whom, as underpaid civil servants, she cooked hundreds of nutritional breakfasts.

When she died, door porches sprouted multiple bells with names on sticky tape and the wrought iron railings spawned student bicycles.

I bought a redbrick in Ranelagh in 1976 for £20,000. Taking me around the brown decor, skirting the mahogany tables, the genteel, elderly sisters intoned the virtues: "Bootiful velvet curtains, dese, cleaned every spring." They accepted an offer of £20,000 but asked - as a favour - to say it was €21,000, "if the neighbours asked".

None did, because Ranelagh was undergoing massive population change.

In a state of stasis since the 1960s, Dublin was on the cusp of a property makeover that would last beyond imagining. The brown doors of civil service rectitude and marian blue (last painted in 1955), gave way to Habitat colours, imported by returned migrants from London or Boston or Sydney.

By the late 1980s, as the new suburbs stretched southwards to Bray and prosperity clogged the Stillorgan dual-carriageway, Ranelagh prices zoomed.

Neighbours gathered at gates to mark the first half-a-million. By the 1990s, prices hit the stratosphere - driven by lawyers uprooting from Wicklow, to live in Ranelagh, in order to walk to tribunals, where they would be employed at megabucks for years to come.

With its trees, parks and gardens, Ranelagh still had a "country" feel to it, 15 minutes walk from St Stephen's Green. Aided by such eco-attractions, by 2001 a million was common. For a three-bedroom redbrick in Edenvale, Beechwood or Mountain View? Amazing, but true.

Reasons? Luas factor (three stops in Ranelagh), restaurants (safe from Temple Bar drunks), boutiques, schools - the names say it all: Muckross, Alex, Sandford Park, Gonzaga, a longer walk to Synge Street. Live in Ranelagh and educate the ruling class of the next generation!

By 2005, €1.5 million was standard for a three-to-four-bedroom redbrick in Ranelagh. Where the blonde in the ponytail packs her SUV-guzzler for the bottle bank and treks on safari to Morton's ye Olde Grocery Store.

Still it goes on, with the yellow skips of renovation like giant urban flowers on every street, active service units of Polish workers at dawn and granite kitchens the norm.

There's not many bedsits left. I'm told there's not much difference, in price, between, say, an untouched 1950s redbrick, with a cold tap in the scullery and outside loo, and a similar house, renovated at huge expense during the 1970s.

Both properties will be gutted, anyway, by the new money. Whatever he may think, she will have her way when it comes to the makeover.

She knows her Farrow and Ball from her elbow, he may not. Nowadays, she may also be supplying half the money. Both may, comparatively speaking, get a bargain, in the 2007 definition of a bargain, meaning €100,000 off the asking price.

But sshhhh! Not a word, because there is a slow down in prices in Ranelagh. A reality check has set-in, hastened by nervous uncertainties over interest rates, economy and election. But redbricks still fetch €1.4 million-€1.7 million, depending on . . . well, on what the vendor will accept below those figures.

But if the neighbours ask, don't say we took €100,000 less.