Work begins on 300 dockland apartments on Cork's Horgan's Quay

The Horgan’s Quay development by Clarendon Properties/BAM should see the delivery of c 200 cost-rental apartments, available to rent at c 25% below the regular local market rate. 

It’s expected the remaining units will be earmarked for sale to owner-occupiers under the Housing Agency’s Croí Cónaithe (Cities) subsidised building scheme. Clarendon Properties’ development director Ronan Downing has previously said he believed they could bring the riverside apartments to market at a starting price of €340,000, targeting first-time buyers.

Piling work at the north quays site by Kent Station has just got underway. The build will consist of a single stepped block, up to 11 storeys in height on the six-acre CIE-owned campus as part of a €160m mixed-use development.

The decision to go ahead with apartments at a time of prohibitively high building inflation was made possible following backing from the State-sponsored Land Development Agency (LDA).

The LDA’s involvement is under Project Tosaigh, a Government initiative to unlock land that private sector owners are struggling to develop due to financing and other constraints. The LDA is already active in the city at the former St Kevin’s Hospital 14-acre site in Shanakiel, where foundations are now visible for the first of 265 social and affordable homes. The LDA is also understood to be in talks with private developer Glenveagh Homes about its plans to build more than 1,000 units across 12 apartment blocks on the former Live at the Marquee site in Cork City, near Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

Glenveagh Homes CEO Stephen Garvey told the Irish Examiner in February that construction at the five-hectare former Ford Distribution site — where decontamination work is ongoing — should begin “sometime into the third quarter of this year”. It’s in developers’ interests to move ahead with construction on foot of the recent Government decision to waive development levies until the end of the year. The suspension of the levies was introduced in April 2023 in an effort to boost house building, and was due to expire this month.

Both the Glenveagh and Horgan’s Quay schemes will deliver c 1,300 units at a time of limited availability of housing stock in the city. In the long term, that figure will double to 2,600 if Leeside Quays Ltd (a subsidiary of O’Callaghan Properties) delivers on its plans to build 1,325 homes in the southern docks, at the Goulding’s site on Centre Park Road/Monahan Road.

The city’s suburbs are due a significant housing boost too under proposals by Dairygold Co-Operative Society Ltd to build 11 apartment blocks at the former CMP Dairies site on Kinsale Road. The €237m residential scheme is set to deliver more than 600 homes. 

A spokesperson has confirmed to the Irish Examiner that the society and Cairn Homes “are exploring a potential partnership, to develop the residential element of the Creamfields development site”. “To progress the partnership agreement, Cairn Homes plc is undertaking some ground investigation and enabling works, including securing the site,” the spokesperson said.

The housing shortage and lack of affordable homes are set to be crunch issues in the upcoming local and European elections on June 7. Yesterday Sherry FitzGerald managing director Marian Finnegan told RTÉ radio that the amount of standing stock available for sale in the country “is at its lowest level in the history of the State”.