“Sales boards have just gone up on two other houses owned by [Derek Quinlan] on Shrewsbury Road, numbers 1 and 3. He purchased these for an estimated €27 million. He had planned to redevelop the houses, first as apartments and later as a 2,787sq m (30,000sq ft) mansion. The houses are now for sale through Sherry FitzGerald, asking €7.5 million for the two.”
Now on MyHome? What a come down!
Now that I’ve finally seen pics of these, that €27m figure seems even more absurd than I could have imagined. I thought that at least they’d be those huge, redbrick, embassy-type houses! Nope. Couple of semi’d’s. Wowza.
Fwiw, it’s only fair to acknowledge that the grounds are enormous for this location. Still, getting 25 x €280,000 apartments or 12 x €550,000 houses on the patch would be a stretch. 4 x €1.7m houses anyone? Fuggin’ madness the lot of it.
back in the day my Daddy parked his car in the garden of one of these, paid a few pounds to a man and we walked up to the Spring Show - or maybe it was the Horse Show.
looking back it seems bizarre that someone living on the poshest road in Ireland would make a few quid doing this or have they been empty that long. (we parked there 25 odd years ago)
Well at least you’ve spent more time in Shrewsbury Road than most of us ever will!!!
I wonder who the previous owners were? They did well.
Sale agreed.
There are now 22 houses for sale in D4 (Errigal House was sold several months ago and still hasn’t been taken down by Savills) over €1,000k.
9 of these are on less than 3 months and over the same period there have been approx 18 sales.
Anyone know what happened to Walford ?
Seems to have dropped off Myhome about 2 weeks ago.
Don’t know if it was sold or just withdrawn however
I always work on the assumption that, were it successfully sold, we’d hear about it !
Often true, but in this case… possibly not. One of the reasons that the house was put to tender rather than auction was due to the nature of the house and its history. The kind of people left here with €15m to spend on what is essentially a 1.8 acre site with a shell of a house may want to keep this relatively low-key. Most of the super rich who have survived the property crash thus far, meaning the rich who probably didn’t just ride the property ladder to the top, might not want to be associated with buying ‘Ireland’s most expensive house’. I think this is quite understandable given the current economic situation of this country. They could have included some sort of privacy clause into the contract to buy the home and therefore it won’t end up on the front of every Irish newspaper, and international publications also, as ‘Mr X buys Ireland’s most expensive home’, ‘X buys Walford at 80% reduction as Irish Tax payer pays the rest’, etc. Even if it has sold, we may not know for some time who the home has sold to if they continue Walford’s infamous secrecy tactics and buy it anonymously through a solicitor or estate agent acting on behalf of a private entity. On the other hand, there is the possibility that the house hasn’t sold, in which case you can be sure that they will make further attempts in the coming months/years to offload it.
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Anonymity for the purchaser happens all the time, but that doesn’t prevent an EA stating that the property is sold.
Given current market conditions, there’s little doubt in my mind that any EA who sell’s ‘Irelands most expensive property’, will make a bit of a song and dance out of it for advertisement purposes.
Yes that is true, however once it is announced that the property is sold - it drags the media spotlight onto the property again along mystery, rumours, etc. which make the public interested again. That can be avoided by letting the property quietly fade away until its forgotten about rather than having the sale announced, which I’m sure can be negotiated with the estate agents, especially when you’re paying commission on such a big sale - getting the glory isn’t much good if you have to forfeit your commission. If it’s announced that the property is sold then people will pay attention and be on the lookout again, it only takes one passing pedestrian, one angry neighbour (always planning disputes on Shrewsbury), or one reporter to catch the new owners visiting the property. For example, Sean Dunne’s controversial Connecticut property - despite the fact that he and his wife completely denied allegations of ownership, its hard to deny it when someone records you visiting the site
youtube.com/watch?v=mOVtxYeILv8&feature=youtu.be
The ownership won’t be kept a secret forever - its very difficult to keep the owner-occupier’s identity a secret when they’re actually living at the property, but in the years of planning applications and construction that Walford has ahead of it, it would be quite easy to hide the identity of the true owners should they wish to do so. Within this time people might just forget about the property, we’ll already know what was paid for it by an independent entity when the price achieved is released with the upcoming database, and then the story is over - they’ll just be another resident of Shrewsbury Road, with no story particularly worth publishing in the papers. There’s a limit to the amount of times that the Walford story can be revived.
To SoCoDu – Your property blog is very well done and interesting for anyone curious about Shrewsbury Road – I enjoyed the detour. Does it only cover that road? Someone should do the same for Ranelagh/Rathmines/Rathgar which also has lots of interesting architectural and family home history.
Thank you very much. In fact, it covers mostly Dalkey and Killiney (with the short exception that I made by doing some of Shrewsbury). I only started it around a month and a half ago and the posts take a considerable amount of time, so it’s difficult to get a high volume of them done. I tend to concentrate on unique houses that have unusually large sites or proportions. You can see the full list of ones I’ve done so far here;
Just read your Cliff Castle article, SoCoDu. Ahh, memories. My family was one of the 21sts in 1984 – it may even be that we contributed to the loss of its drinks license 
You could say exactly the same about the French embassy on Ailesbury Road.
independent.ie/national-news/bids-to-start-at-60m-as-france-says-adieu-to-the-embassy-mile-1268466.html
When it came to the market there was a fair amount of publicity.
Then you had the inevitable ‘lots of interest’ from the EAs.
And then … nothing.
All I’m saying is, it is rare for ‘nothing’ to mean it is sold.
Ireland is small, Dublin is tiny.
Sales on this scale don’t stay secret for very long and usually there’s a ‘hint’ of something in the pipeline from the EA that surfaces in some newspaper property column.
It’s all publicity for the EA in the end and with the market this tight (for supply), they will be eager to let it be known that they executed a successful sale of this size.
I would suspect if it’s sold, we’ll hear about it sooner rather than later.