At the turn of this century, a "capital house" in fashionable Dartmouth Square, with "four bedrooms, drawingroom and diningroom, hot bath and servant's room, wc and pantry and garden front and rear" was advertised for the princely sum of £775.
If you had twice that amount to spend in 1890, you could have had a detached house on leafy Ailesbury Road for £1,050, a detached house on an acre in Sandymount for £1,000 or six acres in Merrion for £800.
Leafing through estate agents' advertisements from the early part of the century makes tantalising reading. You could buy space, and plenty of it, before Dublin began to sprawl ever outwards.
In 1909, an advertisement offered a brand new house on the Hill of Howth with "splendid water supply, motor house, tennis court, and croquet lawn, five bedrooms, three reception rooms, two hall-doors, a hot bath and greenhouse etc", for the "reduced price" of £1,500, through auctioneers James H North & Co. And if all that wasn't enough, the deal included the perk of two years free first-class rail tickets thrown in to make it a real contender for the sale of the century. Today, you'd be lucky to get the same house for £2 million and you would be paying your own DART fares. But the housing market in the early part of the century was sluggish, to say the least, according to research figures supplied by the Sherry FitzGerald agency, only 60 houses were built in the suburbs of Terenure, Rathmines, Rathgar, Harold's Cross, Rathfarnham and Templeogue and Dartry between 1875-1914. This figure jumped to 200 per annum between 1922 and 1960.
There were bargains to be had if you kept a keen eye out. In January, 1907, an advertisement in The Irish Times informed readers that £140 would purchase a nine-roomed house on North Circular Road "which would suit a private hotel". In the same year, you could have bought a terrace of six houses in Navan for just over £1,000; a small terraced redbrick house on Russell Avenue, Drumcondra, for £210; a house on Botanic Avenue, Glasnevin, cost £225 and one in Auburn Avenue, Donnybrook, was £420.
A five-bedroom house in Clarinda Park, East Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) cost £600; a two-storey semi-detached house with good gardens on Palmerston Road, Rathmines, was £650; a five-bedroom house in Leeson Park with four reception rooms and "perfect sanitation" and two servants rooms could be purchased for £1,750. Prices outside Dublin were even cheaper. "A handsome residence and 120 acres" could be purchased in Wicklow for £1,200.
Over the next two decades, house prices rose only marginally. In March, 1914, The Irish Times reported that the tenement problem had reached crisis point as the great Dublin townhouses of the 18th century were forsaken by the upper classes. "The average wage paid to an unskilled labourer was about 18s a week .
. . Instead of one family occupying a ten-room house, there is a family in every room, each paying from 2s to 3s a week for its accommodation." By the early 1920s, the fledgling Irish Free State was experiencing problems of unemployment, emigration, poverty and stagnant house prices. In 1924, a four-bedroom house in Carrickmines with a dressingroom and maid's room, hot bath, kitchen and out-offices and chauffeur's house and no less than 50 acres could be purchased for £4,000, through Dockrell Ltd. In Co Leitrim, a "handsome modern residence" without basement but with 40 acres, shooting over 5,000 acres and seven miles of salmon fishing was on the market at a saucy £9,000. In Greystones, where De Valera once lived, a "charming villa" with croquet lawn was £1,500 in 1922.
Between 1923-1930, some 5,000 houses were built in Dublin alone. In 1922, a house on Dufferin Avenue, off the South Circular Road, cost £750; a modern residence on the HiIl of Howth with three acres was £3,000; a house in Fitzwilliam Square recently vacated by a medical man cost £1,500 - today it would be worth close to £2 million. New detached villas at Marlborough Road, Glenageary, went on sale for £1,400 which boasted, "modern labour saving devices", room for a tennis court and had "electric light and gas laid on".
By the 1930s, there were still 18,000 families living in tenement housing, wages were low but, despite this, building activity remained at a relatively high level. Much of the building activity centred around public authority housing. In 1937, the ESB took out an ad in The Irish Times inviting people to visit "Another All-Electric House at 33 Annaville Park, Dundrum". In 1935 a new semi-detached house on the Beaufield Estate, Stillorgan, cost £850 and a four-bedroom semi-detached house in Mount Merrion Park, now Stillorgan Road, was £920.
You could purchase a house on Lower Mountown Road, Dun Laoghaire, for £850; a four-bedroom house on Botanic Road, Glasnevin, cost £1,000 and a new semi-detached four-bedroom house in Roebuck, Mount Merrion, cost £1,350. The same house today would be worth £450,000-plus. The early 1940s, the era of the glimmerman and general war-time austerity, saw the desertion of more of the city's big houses. An Irish Times editorial in February, 1943, observed: "The expense of their upkeep is heavy; there was a time when private people could afford it but that time is past; the rate of taxation against income is heavy nowadays, and by all the signs will be heavier still in the obscure years following the present war."
The early 1950s was a time of mass emigration and building trade recession. More than 1,500 houses were abandoned by their tenants at the height of the depression. According to Mark FitzGerald, chairman of the Sherry FitzGerald Group, many of these people headed to England in search of work. Typical of a trend towards downsizing was the late Sean Lemass, Taoiseach in the late-1950s and 1960s, who sold his house on Palmerston Road and moved to a smaller property in Rathfarnham.
IN 1953, a five-bedroom house on Palmerston Road would have cost £3,750; a four-bedroom house on Stillorgan Road, Donnybrook, cost £2,550, and a three-bed house in Finglas was £1,500.
The economic up-turn of the 1960s brought with it a buoyant optimism and modernity in the shape of pioneering office blocks and shopping centres - and the razing of many historical buildings. House prices remained relatively low. In 1964, a house on The Rise, Glasnevin sold for £4,500 - it is now worth in the region of £375,000£400,000. A three-bed house in Grove Park, Finglas, cost £2,500 in 1966 - now worth in excess of £150,000. An artisan redbrick house on Hope Street, Ringsend, sold in January 1969 for £2,000. Today it is worth £175,000. In 1968, a house on Sorrento Terrace sold for £7,500 and one on Argyll Road, Ballsbridge, sold for £12,650 in 1969. Sorrento Terrace is now a more expensive address than Argyll Road.
It wasn't until the end of the 1970s that seaside residences began to show their potential. In 1979, Beulah, on Harbour Road, Dalkey - a large Victorian house with extensive grounds - sold for £379,000, "unheard of money then", says Lisney's Tom Day. Three years earlier, 73 Ailesbury Road had been one of the first houses to sell for over £100,000. In 1981, Bartra, the house next door to Beulah, fetched £500,000, another stupefying record. The house was to surprise the market again in 1996 when it was sold for £1.95m to Gavin O'Reilly and his wife, Alison Doody. House prices increased by a further 10 per cent between 1985 and 1986 and there were further price rises until 1989, in what was a mini boom. `Mini', that is, by comparison with the boom of the last five years, when prices in some parts of Dublin have risen by more than 300 per cent.
