Sligo Farm Sales and Leases
Sligo Estate Agents, REA McCarrick & Sons report a busy year throughout 2018 on all aspects of farm sales and leases.
Despite the many challenges presented throughout 2018 – a wet winter, cold spring, including snow and summer drought, farmers are still interested in purchasing and leasing land.
Firm Principal, Roger McCarrick reports a good year for farm sales, having sold over 20 parcels of land throughout Co. Sligo during 2018. Values varied, depending on quality, location and demand, but most of it averaged between €4k - €7k per acre, if good quality and well located. One parcel of land which went to Auction in July, located in the Templeboy area made €10,000 per acre. This comprised 24 acres top quality land and realised €240,000.
On the leasing front, most land is now being leased long term, for terms of at least 5 years. This gives good security of tenure to the tenant so that they can do plenty of improvements on the land which is good for the owner. Long leases are tax free for the landlord, so this is another reason to enter into a long lease.
Each autumn and winter, land owners review their own personal situation and begin to make plans for future years.
Roger McCarrick is a Farm Consultant and Auctioneer with 35 years’ experience in advisory work, and he will be happy to discuss options with any owner considering their future involvement in farming.
He can be contacted in confidence for a meeting at 087-6810848. THE President of ICMSA has criticised the programme to close down a substantial number of rural post offices and said that it was yet more evidence of what he described as “yawning infrastructure imbalance” between investment in urban and suburban areas and rural districts. Pat McCormack noted that there appeared to be a deliberate policy of applying the most crude cost-benefit analysis to any kind of rural infrastructure that contrasted with the ‘money-no-object’ approach that was adopted to astronomically expensive public investment projects for cities.
Mr McCormack guessed that the annual cost of subventing all the rural post offices earmarked for closure would amount to “a few metres of Luas rail” but that the State has evidently decided that spending on one element of the population is an unquestionable national priority while maintaining any kind of state presence in whole swathes of rural districts is too much of an inconvenience.
The ICMSA President also noted how unfortunate the timing of the announcement is, coming so close after the much-touted rural broadband roll-out has yet again run into contractual quicksand and lost still more of its dwindling impetus. Mr McCormack said that the original plan had obviously been to have the broadband roll-out and post office closures overlapping so that the loss of access would be disguised. That always looked unlikely and now looked positively impossible.
“The Government simply cannot continue to pay ‘ lip service’ to rural communities; we are losing essential services and the Government is letting it happen and not putting in place viable alternatives. For example, in many rural areas and villages people now have no access to cash facilities pushing more and more economic activity into large towns and cities. Convenient access to money promotes economic activity and to counteract the closure of post offices in many rural communities ICMSA believe that publicly-funded cash points should be installed in these villages to assist the local economic activity. Government should also look at a range of incentives aimed at supporting and developing rural economic activity. The investment and infrastructure imbalance was always there but in recent times it has widened to the point where rural dwellers are entitled to feel forgotten. Irish state investment and infrastructure desperately needs rebalancing”, concluded Mr. McCormack.