€1.6m house is first auction sale of year
THREE months into the year, a house in Dublin finally sold at an auction yesterday.
It was standing room only at Lisney's on St Stephen's Green as No 49 Eglinton Road became the first Dublin residential property to change hands at a public auction this year.
The house in Donnybrook, Dublin 4, sold for €1.6m, well above its advised minimum value (AMV) of €1.3m.
The landmark sale comes despite new figures which show the average house price has now plunged by €55,000 since February 2007. The drop of 18pc means the average price of a house sold nationally has fallen to €256,573.
In the first two months of this year, some €5,000 was wiped off the value of the average house, according to the latest house price index from Permanent TSB and the Economic and Social Research Institute. There were four or five serious contenders in yesterday's auction, after the bidding opened at €1m.
The property is a two- storey 185.7sqm Edwardian home with five bedrooms and a 10m x 33m garden.
Auctions of such properties are unusual these days, but at the height of the boom, auctions were 10 a penny, particularly in areas such as Eglinton Road, which had quite a few houses for sale in 2006.
Among them were: No 58 Eglinton Road, a four- bedroom property, which went to auction in November with an AMV of €6m; No 53 had an AMV of €4.5m in October; in July, No 75 was also asking €4.5m; and in June, No 39 was asking €4m. All failed to sell at auction. What did sell, however, was the more reasonably priced No 45 Eglinton Road. It sold above the AMV of €2.5m.
Auctions are the best way of gauging the market and when a property like this sells at €1.6m, it indicates we are at or close to the bottom of the market.
- Yvonne Hogan, Property Editor
