Just €200,000 buys you six homes that once cost €550,000 each
At the height of the property boom, a four-bed detached house in an unfinished estate in Kiltullagh was asking €550,000 – now, SIX of them, as well as sites for six more, are on the market with a price tag of €200,000 for the lot!
In a prime example of the extent of the property crash in Galway, that’s a slump of more than 94% in perceived value.
Now, the properties are valued at just over €33,000 each (excluding the value of the other sites).
Six of the detached houses at Páirc an Romhanaigh have been completed, as have an internal access road and some landscaping on the eastern edge of Kiltullagh near Athenry, while the water treatment plant has not been completed.
There is planning permission for a further six detached houses on the site – the entire lot is set to go under the hammer at an auction in Dublin later this month with a reserve price of €200,000.
Martin Fox, a stonemason and paver from Oranmore, along with his business partner Gary Duffy from Ballyglunin, set up Trygal Developments after buying the six-acre site in 2006 – when development land prices had almost peaked.
They started work in January 2007 and completed six of the houses and proudly boasted of their high specification and energy efficiency when they launched them in mid-2008.
But the market was already showing signs of turmoil, and it wasn’t long before construction was halted, and finance-providers ACC Bank appointed receivers to the company, which had debts of almost €3 million, according to the most-recent accounts for 2009.
See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.