Daft Property - Irish Property News

Trophy seaside home tells story of the boom... IF A SINGLE house could tell the story of the property boom then it might be Sorrento Villa on Vico Road in Dalkey, Co Dublin. The Victorian detached house, facing the sea, slumbered up on the hill for decades, its interior divided into two spacious units that would have been described as flats rather than apartments. The house dates from the 1860s when it was built by a provost of Trinity College as a summer villa: and he chose one of the finest sites on the hill with a sunny east-to-south exposure. Two years ago when property prices reached fever pitch, it came on the market with an Advised Minimum Value (AMV) of €4.5 million. However, after intense bidding at auction it sold for €5.6 million. Stamp duty at 9 per cent added an additional €500,000. The new owners went on to spend many thousands more on redecorating the rooms and making changes to the layout, converting it to a five-bedroom house. They also drew up plans to install an expe...

Developers are offering substantially lower prices in the hope of shifting remaining units at schemes built in the last two to three years... PRICE CUTS of up to 40 per cent are being offered by builders in an attempt to get the stalled new homes market moving again and to clear unsold units. While price reductions are bringing many new homes back to pre-2006 prices and interest rate cuts have gone a long way towards improving affordability, lack of finance and negative sentiment remain as the big hurdles for potential buyers. A raft of new homes developers are hoping to shift remaining units at developments built in the last two to three years and are pitching prices at substantially less than the original asking prices. For many builders it is not a case of making a profit any more, it’s simply making some sales to cover the cost of building and paying off some of the debt on sites. Price cuts will be most prominent in large schemes on the edge of the city where developers have stru...

With Dublin now suffering from major urban sprawl many developers are proposing building higher buildings. This makes sense but should have been started years ago before most of the greenbelt around the city was converted in bland, soulless housing estates. The U2 Tower, is a proposed landmark skyscraper, due to be constructed in Dublin (so called because of the involvement of U2 the rock band): The U2 Tower will be built in the South Docklands at the corner of Sir John Rogerson's Quay and Britain Quay by a unique meeting point of the River Liffey, the River Dodder, and the Grand Canal. The design was announced on October 12 2007 is by Foster and Partners (some of their other projects include Greystones New Quarter in Ireland, Millennium Bridge in London, Millau Viaduct Bridge in France to mention but a few.) The proposed Tower will consist of luxury apartments, with a public viewing platform at 100m, just below an egg-shaped pod that will be U2's recording studio. Above this i...