Hazelwood is a mixed development of new detached and semidetached three and four-bed bungalows and two-storey houses on the Dublin side of Gorey, Co Wexford, a town over 50 miles from Dublin that looks set to become one of its newest suburbs. Dublin commuters are attracted by the availability of new homes at prices that are very competitive not just with Dublin, but even with nearby Arklow and Wicklow.
In Hazelwood, a two-storey 1,027-sq-ft three-bed semi costs £85,950, a detached three-bed dormer bungalow, £91,950. A four-bed 1,348 sq ft semi costs £94,950, a detached double-fronted 1,650 sq ft four-bed costing £133,950. About 30 of the recently launched first phase of 65 houses have been sold. In all, there will be 150 houses in the scheme, with sales being handled by Myles Doyle & Sons of Arklow.
The showhouse - a four-bed 1,540 sq ft detached home costing £114,950 - shows the quality of the scheme: it has an attractive dash and redbrick exterior, a livingroom with an attractive black slate fireplace opening into a diningroom through glazed doors, a good-sized kitchen with the now de rigueur Shaker-style units and a utility room off it, and upstairs, four bedrooms, the main one en suite. This house type has a garage with a hardwood door. The scheme is located just a few minutes walk from both a Tesco supermarket and a large community school.
There are a number of recently launched new homes on the market at present (see panel). There are also homes for sale in the tax designated seaside resorts of Courtown Harbour, Riverchapel and Poulshone, and agents like Lorcan Allen of Allen & Kenny expect that some of these will be bought by people who want to live in them year round. Ironically, because they are tax designated holiday homes, they can cost considerably more than homes in Gorey. Allen is handling sales of a recently-released scheme of three and four-bed detached dormer bungalows in Poulshone Harbour for sale from £120,000 to £140,000 (less £10,000, if you don't want them fully-furnished). There are also plenty of second-hand houses available, both in the town or in villages and countryside nearby, with prices ranging from £50,000/£60,000 upwards.
The population of Gorey, Co Wexford - about 4,000 - has increased only by a few hundred people in the past five years, according to official statistics. But that is almost certain to change in the next five. For Gorey, fifty miles from the Loughlinstown roundabout at Shankill, Co Dublin, is poised to become one of Dublin's newest suburbs.
The idea of driving 50-plus miles a day before even joining the capital's traffic jams to work is still shocking for many Dubliners. But many first-time buyers are opting to emigrate south to take advantage of substantially lower prices.
And they truly are lower: you can buy a new 1,000-sq-ft-plus three-bed semi-detached house for under £85,000 in Gorey, some 25 per cent cheaper than the cheapest similar new house in Dublin. (And the contrast could hardly be greater between the price of apartments or former local authority homes in walking distance of Dublin's city centre, where you can pay £100,000 or so for about 400 sq ft of accommodation, often in not very "good" areas.)
Indeed, new house prices in Gorey can be between 10 per cent and 25 per cent cheaper than in Arklow or Wicklow town, according to Arklow estate agent Breda Birmingham, who is handling the sales of Hazelwood. The result is that there is strong demand for the increasing number of new homes coming on the market in Gorey, both from local people and Wicklow people, as well as from Dubliners.
Agents like Ciara Slattery of Warren Estates report that up to half the inquiries, and perhaps under half of the purchases of new homes are made by Dubliners. Long-distance commuting is still a new concept for most Irish people, and it remains to be seen whether people working in Dublin will stick with it in the long run.
One couple who bought a four-bed detached bungalow on over half an acre near the sea a few miles north of Gorey for £87,000 a year ago reckon that it takes them two hours to commute to Dublin's city centre, whether by rail or car. They leave home at about 6:45 a.m. or earlier either way - the train from Arklow at 6:55 a.m. reaches Dublin at about 8:50 a.m. But two return rail tickets a month cost them £180, and they find driving the car up the busy N11 cheaper. Petrol for the whole week, including weekends, totals around £30. On balance, they are happy with their move: "When we bought our first house in Lucan five years ago, we could leave at 8.15 a.m. to get to work; by last year, we had to leave at 7.45 a.m." But although commuting costs them twice as much and takes twice the time, they believing they've got a good deal.
Many first-time buyers might agree that the commuting time is worth it to have a good house in an attractive small town with a pleasant quality of life, only minutes' drive from North Wexford's beautiful beaches - although some confess that it's "heavy-going", says Ciara Slattery.
Commuting time to Dublin will improve when the Arklow bypass opens soon after Christmas, cutting up to 10 or 15 minutes off the journey, Breda Birmingham reckons. The downside of that, however, is that traffic jams on Gorey's main street will almost certainly get worse, when traffic on the N11 is funnelled straight into it from the new bypass. In summertime, when the population of this part of North Wexford can leap to about 30,000 people (Courtown Harbour is just a few miles down the road) it can take 45 minutes to get from one end of the main street to the other on a fine Friday evening, according to Wexford County Council's Special Developments Manager, Adrian Doyle. Many commuters, understandably, are looking for a home on the Dublin side of town.
In the short-term, Wexford County Council is preparing a traffic management plan which will, amongst other things, tackle the town's parking problems; this is to be implemented in the next three or four months. In the long-term, it's probable that Gorey too will get its own bypass, and the National Road Authority is currently examining where the bypass might go - but one isn't likely to be built before 2005, according to Doyle.
Eventually, Gorey may have a commuter rail service, when Iarnrod Eireann has finished upgrading the Rosslare-Dublin line. In the meantime, many commuters drive to Arklow, to take the train from there, while some park in Bray, and DART the rest of the way to work.
Apart from traffic, Gorey, which has a lot of good building land zoned for development, seems pretty well-prepared for a rise in population, according to agents like Birmingham and Slattery, and Adrian Doyle of the county council. It has probably the largest community school in Leinster, with 1,500 pupils, and a number of primary schools. There is a large Tesco, as well as Pettitts, the popular Wexford supermarket chain, and a reasonable number of boutiques and other shops.
And although it doesn't have, for example, branches of major chainstores, or a cinema, or swimming-pool, Gorey people would go to Enniscorthy or Wexford, about 20 and 28 miles away for facilities like these, says Ciara Slattery. Many people will be attracted by the idea of living in this pleasant small town, long a thriving market town attracting business from all over North Wexford. It has an obvious pride in its history: two 1798 memorials commemorate the role of North Wexford in the Rising. And Gorey has a good social infrastructure, with a thriving amateur dramatic society and an annual theatre festival, and a wide range of clubs -- from golf/tennis/soccer/rugby/GAA/boxing to photography and bridge.
