Talking Property

People now want a trophy home 'for the price of a tent', writes ISABEL MORTON

THIS WEEK we see the launch of a few superb examples of Dublin 4 trophy homes on the beleaguered Irish property market.

Property developer Hugh O’Regan’s home in Park Avenue, Sandymount has an asking price of €3.5 million and financier Derek Quinlan’s semi-detached residence on Shrewsbury Road is now on the market for €7.5 million – which is probably less than a third of its value at the height of the property boom in 2006.

(So much for economists who tell us that property prices have only fallen by 37.5 per cent from their peak.)

As semi-detached houses go, Quinlan’s is in a different league. Apart from the fact that it’s a large period pile located on Dublin 4’s premier road, it has been kitted out by the Queen’s nephew David Linley, who is responsible for many of the bespoke fixtures and fittings.

However, the €7.5 million asking price is no more than that – an asking price – and it remains to be seen whether or not it will ever be achieved.

Trophy homes – particularly those in Dublin 2, 4 and 6 – are very much in the spotlight these days, as their values plummet from the dizzy heights they once reached during the boom years.

Where some may not originally have felt much sympathy for high profile vendors, many are now a lot more sympathetic, as they find themselves in similar circumstances.

The problem is that there appears to be little or no market for these homes any more, partly because many are so fearful about their financial situation that they have lost their appetite for these properties and partly because the banks are just not lending anybody the money to buy them.

Another, somewhat less high profile, example of a Dublin 4 trophy home is the Moorings, 59 Merrion Road, which was originally launched by Lisney in late February this year, asking €4.25 million.

Its launch on the sales market was unusual, in that there was no attempt to hide the fact that the property was being sold by Bank of Ireland. Indeed, this information was highlighted, as was the likelihood that it would be the first of many “forced sales” of trophy homes.

Indeed that has since proved to be the case.

But, despite its prime location, the Moorings has been sitting on the market for months and recently had its asking price reduced to €2.95 million.

If the value of these properties continues to drop, the value of lesser properties will follow suit in a downward spiral.

This is bad enough for individual property owners, whose homes are plummeting in value. However, the bigger picture is infinitely worse as our banks’ – and indeed our entire country’s – wealth is so tied into peak property values.

Ireland has never attracted the international set. The nearest we ever came to it was a few decades ago when a smattering of Germans bought a few rural boltholes for fishing and shooting holidays and the odd romantic American bought a thatched cottage to remind themselves of why their grandparents left these shores in the first place.

Irish people were the only ones who ever bought Irish property. We competed with each other to bring prices up to unsustainable levels and, now that most of us have stepped back from the table, there are very few left to mop up the crumbs.

So, who will buy these trophy homes and at what price?

There are a few professionals such as doctors and barristers who may not have been ‘lucky’ enough to have been invited to join one of Derek Quinlan’s boom-time property syndicates and may now ironically, have the money to buy his private home.

However, the likelihood is that the only potential purchasers will be businessmen who sold their companies and properties at peak of the market and then sat tight and waited, and those returning from abroad.

But these people are cautious and becoming increasingly fussy.

“They want all their boxes ticked” reported one agent, who complained that potential buyers were “very demanding and virtually impossible to please. They were convinced, the agent said, that something better would come on the market for less” and were sure that their perfect home was “just a repossession away”.

This week will see the vultures out circling around the Dublin 4 area again: although the era of ‘trophy homes’ may be long over, the desire to live in one still exists.

These days however, as one estate agent put it, “they all want the Taj Mahal for the price of a tent”.

Isabel Morton is a property consultant