Sky’s the limit for €5.3m Cork complex Flying Enterprise

The Flying Enterprise licensed complex, with bar, restaurant, and an extensive outdoor courtyard facility with capacity for 700 revellers has just come up for sale, with a €5.3m price tag. The mix includes a shop, a former school building let to third level college MTU, and five apartments, bringing €185,000 pa in rental income, on top of trading income from substantial turnovers.

There’s also planning permission for function room use in the former 1820s CBS school building on Sullivan’s Quay, to be accessed off the historically-named Sober Lane.

Long-term owners of the various enterprises are Finbarr and Dolly O’Shea, now stepping back from the family-run business The Flying Enterprise, after 45 years at the helm. During their time, they vastly expanded its various elements from the traditional bar they took over in 1980. They redeveloped the main building, going upwards to four storeys for apartments to rent (they bring in €105,000 pa) , adding a newsagency/deli/off-licence Quay News. The sizeable old CBS Sullivans Quay school with 200 year history is also a part of their portfolio.

Part of that ex-school addition includes a building on Cove St with floors let for classrooms to Munster Technological University and the MTU also owns 46 Grand Parade, an historic building on the Lee’s facing river bank, used for gallery and other uses by MTU’s College of Art, with the main MTU Crawford College of Art campus 500 metres away, past the landmark St Fin Barre’s Cathedral. A similar distance downriver is the South Terrace site bought by UCC for its new Business School, yet to commence.

Also very close to The Flying Enterprise are the Nano Nagle Centre, the adjacent Cork Centre for Architectural Education, and tourism draw Elizabeth Fort, forming part of a tourism triangle that reaches to the English Market on Grand Parade.

Ironically, given the active institutional, educational and tourism draws on the doorstep of the Flying Enterprise, it’s notable that two long-idle city centre sites almost bookend The Flying Enterprise, both controlled by BAM.

These are the Event Centre site by South Gate Bridge, which has been tied up in a long-running development saga and has now gone out to retendering, as well as the former Revenue Commissioners site on Sullivan Quay, acquired in 2006 as part of a site swap deal and now rubble-strewn after various plans for a hotel (220 bed plus 12-storey cylindrical tower, approved in 2018), offices, retail and residential have not been enacted.

BAM/Live Nation’s costs for the Event Centre site rose from €50m to €100m, with rival sites including docklands now actively pitched.

Other portions of the BAM/ex-Beamish & Crawford brewery site have, however, seen delivery of offices, convenience retail and student accommodation, whilst new pedestrian bridges over the Lee’s South Channel are being provided from South Main Street/proposed Events Centre site towards UCC, MTU, and St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, being delivered this year.

The Flying Enterprise mix spans over 20,000sq ft of buildings in their various uses, while the enclosed Courtyard area is considered a key attraction for its next stage of development, once in new hands.

It goes to the open market this week as a going concern, with expressions of interest sought by April 10, in lots or in its entirety. The complex includes most of the block, fronting four streets, with other traders including another pub, Fordes Bar, and a pharmacy, all at the foot of Barrack St.

The €185,000 pa in rental income will be a bulwark for buyers who may seek to release further scope, suggest joint selling agents Margaret Kelleher of Cohalan Downing and Tony Morrisey of Lisney, who describe it as “an iconic, long-established licensed premises with further development potential and significant rental income.”

The bar was named after SS Flying Enterprise, a ship sunk in 1952 off the south coast after an accident on Christmas Day in 1951, but towed to Falmouth where it sank two weeks later.

Questions were asked about the merchant ship’s mysterious cargo: in 1956 novelist Hammond Innes fictionalised its tale in The Wreck of the Mary Deare, while Richard Harris, Michael Redgrave, Gary Cooper, and Charlton Heston starred in a MGM 1959 movie version of The Flying Enterprise as a phantom ship.

Seventy years on, Cork got to keep the name over the door of what’s still very much a buoyant Flying Enterprise.

• DETAILS: cohalandowning.ie, lisney.com