Second sale of multi-million euro land from the Ursulines Sisters to Cork’s Blackrock

Hitting the market this week, with a guide price of over 4 million euros, a 3.26-acre piece of land in the transformed suburban village of Cork Harbor, where hundreds of new homes and apartments have now been built. were built on former land belonging to a convent, and where the Ursulines Sisters have been present for 250 years.

The sale offer includes a walled site, accessible by Convent Avenue, of more than three acres, which currently contains a modern 8,700 square foot two-storey building, with 16 rooms (15 of which are en-suite) and facilities.

Most likely to be a development for housing, it also has the possibility of a retirement home / retirement village.

It was built on two
decades ago, as the sisters of the Order of the Ursulines left their historic 18th-century convent and former school building, built in 1720 for a wealthy merchant, Christopher Tuckey, as one of the finest homes of Cork City.

Then named Pleasant Fields, the sprawling property was purchased from a town jeweler, a Mr. Theuron, for £ 5,000 (according to the authority of Yale University Press Buildings of Ireland Cork City and County by Frank Keohane) in 1820s by the Order of the Ursulines, as they expanded from the southern parish of what is now Nano Nagle Place.

Following the construction of a new girls’ college, the old school, convent and chapel, on 32 hectares, were put up for sale by the Ursulines in 2001, sold for € 13 million in 2002, bought by Lyonshall.

The developers then planned over 500 houses and apartments, based on a design by architects O’Mahony Pike (OMP Architects), then resold them for over 30 million euros, most of it to Pierce Contracting for new construction at high density, and the Convent at Firestone Developments.

The two projects changed hands again after the crash, before the convent, Blackrock House, was completed for luxury apartments. Glenveagh Properties is completing the balance of the Pierce / Eden element, having paid € 9m for the balance, which had 140 units to complete before strategic housing development planning was granted for 274 apartments – the site that keep giving?

Now, with the latest site of the convent lands coming to the open market, real estate agent James O’Donovan of Savills describes the Order of the Ursuline recent residential enclave on 3.26 acres, with a 16-bed building. , as an unencumbered opportunity
and “a premier development site in one of Cork’s most desirable and sought-after residential addresses”.

Amid a housing shortage and the government’s Housing for All plan for 300,000 new homes by 2030, “there is a real shortage of top quality building land in Cork’s prime residential areas. – and that certainly ticks that box, “Mr. O’Donovan says, saying” a development site of this quality is sure to grab the attention of developers both locally and nationally. “

The future development of this guided site of more than 4 million euros could encompass private, social or approved housing organizations, or a retirement home / retirement community. – laundry, utilities, parking – suggest Savills, whose previous incarnation of the real estate agency as Hamilton Osborne King handled the original $ 13million sale of land and 32-acre convent to the Ursulines in 2002.

They add that the apartments in the converted 18th-century Blackrock House fetched sale values ​​of between € 300,000 and € 700,000, while the four-bed semi-detached houses in Eden’s Blackrock Crescent were selling for around € 440,000 in 2019.

The property currently for sale by private treaty is located along Blackrock’s Convent Road. It is flat, private and landscaped, which “will help create an isolated and exclusive setting for any future development”.

Selling agents predict “a good level of interest in the property not only from developers, but also from a range of buyers across multiple industries given the flexibility of ownership.

“There is no doubt that local and national developers will have an interest given the location and the strong sales and rental values ​​that are being realized at Blackrock, but we also anticipate another interest from the nursing home sector that has been very active in the market for the past two years.

• DETAILS: Savills 021-4271371