WILD GEESE Donagh O'Sullivan Managing director of the London property company, Galliard Homes:Despite the economic difficulties, business is good for the London development company which is now building 2,500 units in the city

DONAGH O’SULLIVAN, from Cullen, near Millstreet, Co Cork, has worked for more than 20 years in Britain – but he is coming home in September to get married.

The September 8th nuptials mark a homecoming of sorts, too, for his bride-to-be, Francesca Fenaroli, even though she had never heard of Millstreet until she met the Cork man in London three years ago.

“We had been dating for about a year when she showed me her family tree in her mother’s house. Her mother’s maiden name was O’Connor,” he says. A quick examination revealed the Millstreet connection.

Fenaroli’s great-great grandfather, John O’Connor, had married in 1872 in the same church in Millstreet that will be used by O’Sullivan and Fenaroli.

“They had known he [O’Connor] was from Cork, but not that he was from Millstreet. This story is more interesting than mine,” he says with a laugh as he sits in an office in Westminster.

The fourth of seven sons, O’Sullivan is today managing director of Galliard Homes, one of the biggest builders of apartments and townhouses in London.

After taking a civil engineering degree in UCC, O’Sullivan left for London in September 1990 with a job offer from the UK contractor, Balfour Beatty. The following two years were spent working for its foundations arm, before O’Sullivan chopped and changed jobs “chasing a bit more money”.

In 1997, he left Cambridgeshire for London, believing he needed to be in the capital. There, he joined Mansell Construction Services. His first job was as project manager on a Galliard development.

Once it was completed, Galliard came with a proposition, asking him to run its then small building department, which at the time completed fewer than 100 units a year.

He joined in April 2001, aged just 33.

“They were a property development company with an in-house small building department,” he says. “They were contracting externally at that time.

“Since then we have grown the business to a situation today where we are building 2,500 units in London alone. The business turns over about £250 million.

“We buy the sites, we get the planning, we sell them and then we build them. So we have 1,600 flats that we rent out. We are completing now about 1,000 flats a year all over London.”

Business, despite the economic difficulties, is good. The crisis, beginning in 2007, caused a dip in London, he says, but it didn’t have a massive effect.

“It had a bit, but at worst through the dip, our sales dropped little less than 20 per cent. Today, sale prices in the right postcode in London are 15 per cent or more higher than they were at the peak.”

Galliard’s mantra, he says, is “to leave some of the deal” for the buyer. “People who have bought flats from us have started off with one or two flats but they now own a portfolio of flats bought at the right price.

“If we are building 10, 50 or 100 flats and we think that the value of each is £200,000, we would prefer to sell them all at £190,000 rather than to be dribbling them out at £200,000.

“It gives us more certainty of turning the money around which is our business, and people generally like that they are

buying it at a tad less than what the real value could be.”

Currently, a Galliard development in Greenwich of 11 blocks of apartments – nearly 1,000 in all – is the second-largest residential development in London, behind only the Olympic Village.

Nearly 350 have already been sold to a housing association, while contracts have been exchanged for 450 of the 636 private apartments, with the rest to go before 2014.

Demand for housing in London remains acute, with rents rising ever higher.

“The biggest problem that we have had in London is that people can’t get mortgages. Getting a mortgage in London is no easier than anywhere else. Everything else in London works but there just isn’t enough stock. There are enough customers,” he says.

Like many London-based Irish, he looked on the property boom at home with astonishment, but stayed away from investing “because it didn’t stack up. At all.

“The exit strategy for our business is not rocket science. You need to have customers who can afford to buy what you are selling and enough of them to make a market.”

Facing urgent calls from Whitehall to build 250,000 houses a year in the UK, builders there in their best year – 2007 – managed to put up 190,000.

“Today, we are still building fewer than 100,000,” O’Sullivan says. “By comparison, when we were at our peak, Ireland built 90,000 – so they built half the number of homes for a tenth of the population.”