Jane Mayne
Real Estate Alliance secured €17.50 per acre for a sale in Killowney, Ballymackey, Nenagh, County Tipperary this week. Understandably, REA’s owner Eoin Dillon says the €762,000 selling price came as “quite a pleasant surprise.”
“Up until now I would have said the current average per acre price for farmland is between 12 and a half to 13 and a half per acre, so I was very happy with the Nenagh sale.”
The MD attributes the good price to it being “a relatively small lot size, and where it was located – there was a lot of very strong dairy farmers close to us.”
In terms of what areas are selling best, he reiterates: “Anywhere where there’s a lot of cows. Black and white ones. Anywhere that’s suitable for dairy.”
In terms of the overall market, he comments that, “house sales have slowed down a little bit, but in general we’re still busy.”
The use of LSL’s online auction facility he says has “certainly added to transparency, and (auctions) tend to be clean, quick and simple.”
He also highlights the benefit of the anonymity factor of buying online: “We used to be asked to buy a load of land. I used to buy more land than I sold, and a lot of solicitors would have been very busy as well buying land at auction, because farmers didn’t want the public to know that it was them that was bidding on it, if you know what I mean. But whereas now with online obviously they can do that themselves and they don’t need a solicitor to bid for them.”
“They can do it in the car or at the kitchen table, and they don’t need to employ a lister or auctioneer to do it for them. So that’s an advantage. Some people in the room I think for the Nenagh sale were actually bidding on their phone and bidding live. They were doing both, or certainly watching both. So whatever works for them.”
Other property market observations Mr Dillon offers is that, “In the first year maybe of lockdown in 2020 we noticed a huge uptake in the number of single ladies buying. But I wouldn’t have said that was any more noticeable now. At the moment there is a very strong Indian community buying houses, and the Eastern Europeans have stopped really buying – there’s not as many Eastern Europeans buying since Ukraine.”
Contact REA’s Eoin Dillon on: +353 67 33468.
For upcoming REA auctions, register to bid: Here.