Sellers of residential properties at the upper end of the market have been having a time of it. The market’s price-growth slowdown and Brexit uncertainty are routinely forcing vendors to drop their prices.
It must have been quite the relief, then, when Mark FitzGerald, the cofounder and chairman of Sherry FitzGerald, signed on the dotted line recently for the sale of his Dublin family home, on Oakley Road in Ranelagh, for €4.935 million.
Full details of the deal were not forthcoming, but it's understood the buyer is an Irish family currently based in the UK. FitzGerald and wife, Derval, put their luxury Edwardian home, Lithgow, on the market in May this year seeking ¤5.25 million, an ambitious-seeming asking price that raised more than a few eyebrows.
Oakley Road may be one of Dublin 6’s finer stretches, but is also considerably more densely populated than its leafier counterparts, such as nearby Temple Road in Dartry, where vast properties on substantial grounds are more likely to command these heady sums – and even they have been struggling of late.
But number 12 is deceptive. Its kerbside look is that of a handsome enough detached home, but inside is a capacious and expensively upgraded 561sq m (6,046sq ft) property on 0.13ha (0.33ac).
There are period and contemporary rooms flowing into each other, a basement entertainment area, and a one-bed mews in the carefully planted garden.
For FitzGerald (and selling agent Geralyn Byrne) it’s an excellent result in just five months – sales in this bracket often take at least a year. No doubt a recent Sherry FitzGerald marketing campaign in the pages of the Financial Times will have helped to grease the wheels among UK buyers.
But what’s likely to delight the doyen of Ireland’s property industry even more than the successful sale is that his swansong valuation was very much on the money.
