Backing the market: the art of flipping

The owners of two adjoining houses on Clonmore Road – a quiet residential street lined with modest bungalows in Mount Merrion, Co Dublin – have

placed the properties back on the market in the last month having bought them in 2013.

It is a move that is a hallmark of rapidly rising Dublin house prices, as one of the homes comes to the market seemingly untouched with a six-figure price rise and the other is being flipped, following renovation.

Number 6, Clonmore Road was sold in October 2013 for €605,000 and has since undergone total redecoration. It comes to the market this time asking €875,000 – nearly 45 per cent more than it achieved last year.

Before its renovation, the house was well maintained, however it featured more knotty pine than a ski chalet, with pine kitchen, doors, architraves, bathrooms, furniture, fitted wardrobes and a vaulted pine ceiling above the dining area.

Internal features

The renovation has seen practically every internal feature updated or replaced, bar a few items such as the bathroom sink and bath.

The new interior is bang on current trends and some improvements have been made that go beyond mere redecoration, such as the replacement of the windows.

While the decorative changes are welcome, some other important changes are sadly lacking. The home’s front elevation remains a hodge-podge of varying roof heights, odd-sized dormer windows, scattered Velux windows and walls jutting out.

Other houses on the street have far more streamlined exteriors, achieved by moving the front walls out to a single level and by redoing the roof to provide one single ridge.

Doing this could have vastly improved the house and it seems like a missed opportunity for the sake of avoiding the additional cost of structural work – something an owner planning on long-term occupation of the house may not have skimped on.

According to agents Sherry FitzGerald, the property covers 153sq m (1,647sq ft) including a converted attic, which contains the master suite. The gardens, front and rear, needed very little work thanks to the previous owners’ landscaping.

If the prop1erty achieves anything near its asking price, the savvy owners are set to make a tidy profit.

Walk-in condition

The adjoining house, Number 8, Clonmore Road, returned to the market in September. It sold in walk-in condition in February 2013 for €800,000. The new owners have placed it back on the market in what seems to be the exact same state and are asking €925,000.

Represented also by Sherry FitzGerald, the house is significantly larger, with 201sq m (2,165sq ft) of internal living space. All four bedrooms boast en-suite bathrooms. There is the added benefit of a separate office/gym in the garden with sauna and bathroom.

Its new asking price of €925,000 represents a price rise of 15 per cent, which could be considered modest considering the astronomical price rises seen in some areas of the capital during the same period.

These price rises have ensured the trend isn’t exclusive to Mount Merrion.

House “flipping” is occurring at every end of the Dublin market – from Shrewsbury Road mansions to modest semis in west Dublin.

Among these flips is 18 Highfield Road, Rathgar, which was bought in August 2012 for €835,000 – it was in need of a complete overhaul. With this renovation complete, the house sold again last month for an astounding €3,300,000 – 10 per cent above its €3 million asking price.

In Dublin’s city centre, 95 Merrion Square West was bought in 2011 for €470,000. Following a renovation said to have cost €1.2 million, the 453sq m (4,881sq ft) property was put on the market for €2.5 million in September.

Renovated and extended

Depending on your definition of a flip, one might also include 12 Neville Road, Rathgar, which came on the market again this month, three years after it was last sold, having been tastefully renovated and extended. Bought in 2011 for €1,373,000, it is now asking €1,850,000.

Another recent flip attempt was 750 Howth Road, Raheny. Asking €860,000, the house sold in February this year for €720,000.

Little if anything appears to have been done to the detached family home on 0.27 acres, which is in need of refurbishment.

So, flipping is certainly not uncommon.

Whether those investors who bought and swiftly resold properties barely touched the houses or renovated completely before reselling, the profit-taking is largely down to the fast rising Dublin property market.

With mounting doubts surrounding the sustainability of these price hikes (particularly in light of the recent Central Bank actions regarding lending limits), flipping may soon no longer be viable for investors.

It is also possible those who have benefited from the market comeback circa 2012 were simply lucky to have bought at the right time and then saw the opportunity to cash in on the unprecedented price rises.