In a wealthy fishing village in Dublin, the Irish trophy home is making a comeback.
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’s first luxury-home development since the bursting of a property bubble in 2008.
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).
“The money was always there, but the confidence wasn’t,” said Cosgrave, a silver-haired 56-year-old. “People have the confidence to go out and buy again.”
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’re targeting locals.
“We’re dependent on the normal market of families trading up and down,” said Simon Ensor, who handles sales of upscale homes at Sherry FitzGerald Group, a property brokerage in Dublin. “We’re now back to the type of people who were there 25 years ago.”
Irish home prices fell by almost 50 percent after a real estate bubble burst in 2008. Values are now surging again, with Dublin home prices rising an annual 20 percent in April, helped by a more stable economy. That prompted the central bank to introduce mortgage caps in February.
Sales Jump
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’s the highest since at least 2010, the data show.
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.