In a wealthy fishing village in Dublin, the Irish trophy home is making a comeback.<\/p>\n
From the top of a hill close to the Irish Sea in Howth, developer Joe Cosgrave watches his team of construction workers racing to finish the granite-framed doorways and vast walk-in wardrobes at the country\u2019s first luxury-home development since the bursting of a property bubble in 2008.<\/p>\n
So far, he has sold nine of the Thormanby Hill houses, which have a price tag of about 1.5 million euros ($1.7 million).<\/p>\n
\u201cThe money was always there, but the confidence wasn\u2019t,\u201d said Cosgrave, a silver-haired 56-year-old. \u201cPeople have the confidence to go out and buy again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cosgrave is banking on the return of wealthy buyers who can afford trophy properties in the wake of the worst real estate crash in Western Europe, with Thormanby Hill testing a market still in recovery. While foreigners and returning Irish emigrants have accounted for luxury-homes purchases since the crash, sellers now say they\u2019re targeting locals.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re dependent on the normal market of families trading up and down,\u201d said Simon Ensor, who handles sales of upscale homes at Sherry FitzGerald Group, a property brokerage in Dublin. \u201cWe\u2019re now back to the type of people who were there 25 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
Irish home prices fell by almost 50 percent after a real estate bubble burst in 2008. Values are now surging again, helped by a more stable economy. That prompted the central bank to introduce mortgage caps in February.<\/p>\n
The new curbs are doing little to deter wealthy buyers. Sales of Irish homes for more than 1 million euros jumped 41 percent to 117 during the first four months of 2015 from a year earlier, according to Sherry Fitzgerald. That\u2019s the highest since at least 2010, the data show.<\/p>\n
Some of the biggest spenders have been from overseas. John Malone, the U.S. cable industry billionaire, spent almost 27 million euros on Castlemartin, an 18th-century estate and stud farm in Kildare in January.<\/p>\n
In one of the biggest residential deals of 2014, Singaporean Cynthia Chua spent almost 8 million euros on \u201cDeepwell,\u201d a coastal mansion to the south of Dublin built by the Guinness family in the 1850s.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy international standards, top-end properties are relatively cheap,\u201d said her husband, Nick Holman, who returned home last year after working abroad in finance. \u201cThey\u2019d compare to the cost of a nice detached house in London.\u201d<\/p>\n
Edwardian houses on Shrewsbury Road in the heart of Dublin\u2019s embassy belt, once home to some of the nation\u2019s biggest property developers, are now selling to a different kind of buyer.<\/p>\n
The National Asset Management Agency, the state\u2019s bad bank, in April sold \u201cMugnano,\u201d a 5,000-square-foot (465-square-meter) home on the road. The buyer was Aengus \u201cGus\u201d Kelly, chief executive officer of Dutch plane-leasing company AerCap Holdings NV, according to two people familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman for AerCap declined to comment.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s happened on Shrewsbury Road over the last five years is that all of the new guys who\u2019d come in, they\u2019re all gone,\u201d said Peter Kenny, an estate agent with Colliers International, as he walked the oak-paneled floors of a mansion on the street he\u2019s trying to sell for 7 million euros. \u201cThere\u2019s a new set of wealthy people who are coming in to take over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kenny is selling the property for creditors of developer Sean Dunne, he said. About half of the buyers of the properties he sells are Irish expatriates,” he said.<\/p>\n
Back in Howth, Cosgrave ponders how times have changed over the last six years, since the National Asset Management Agency took over the 500 million euros of debts he owed to Irish banks. The agency is now helping to finance the construction of his Howth development, where he hopes to build about 30 of the five bedroom, 3,358-square-foot homes.<\/p>\n
Plenty of local Irish people can afford this sort of property, Cosgrave said, helping keep alive the business his family started in 1979.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of our competitors are not in business and, thanks be to God, we are,\u201d Cosgrave said. \u201cWe\u2019re working through it and we\u2019re going to keep fighting the fight.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a wealthy fishing village in Dublin, the Irish trophy home is making a comeback. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n