ONLY TWO properties sold under the hammer at last Saturday’s “mega-auction” organised by Sherry FitzGerald McCreery in Kilkenny which attracted over 150 people.
A four-bedroom semi-detached house, with a guide price of €200,000, was bought by a primary school teacher, Kate O’Donnell, for €212,000 who described her purchase as “a bargain” and said she had “saved €100,000”. She “was going to buy the house 12 months ago for €320,000 but there was some little hitch with the deeds” so she “pulled out of the sale and left it so”.
A four-bedroom, detached “executive residence” overlooking a golf course which, the agent said “at the height of the boom would have sold for in excess of €700,000”, sold for its guide price of €350,000.
Auctioneer Peter McCreery claimed not to be disappointed and dismissed the suggestion that reserve prices were still too high.
He had “six sales before taking up the gavel, two sales under the hammer, two sales immediately after the auction” and is “talking to several bidders on other lots”. The event, he said, had “generated a huge level of interest from the general public, property owners and colleagues in auctioneering throughout the country”.
He said prospective house buyers are “nervous, cautious and choosy but they do exist” and that “banks should loosen their loan criteria and start lending”.
A similar event, but on a national scale, will take place in Dublin on April 30th when the Real Estate Alliance – a network of independent estate agents – will host an auction of “residential, commercial and investment properties from right across the country” at Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel.
