Craic On

Pub Licence

At the very peak of the boom pub licences were changing hands at a price of up to €250,000.

That’s just for the licence – not to buy a pub.

Indeed, I’m told that one pub licence in this area was sold down the country to someone for €180,000.

It used to be that you had to sell it in your own area but they changed that so that it could be sold anywhere in the country.

Much Cheaper

the last info we could find on them was from the Irish Examiner three years ago. It said that they could be bought for as little as €40,000.

That’s a fall of 84%.

And, according to the Examiner, that’s only a notional figure as no one wants to buy them at the moment.

Further Falls

They must have come down further since then.

At Allsop’s last auction (when the Caiseal Mara was sold) there was a pub down the country that sold with a licence, with living space upstairs and a two bedroom house beside it.

The reserve price for all of that was just €20,000.

So, the licence part of it cannot have been worth much.

I’m sure that if you contacted a receiver who had pubs on his or hands on behalf of a bank that they would be happy to sell a licence pretty cheaply if the pub was no longer viable and they had shut it down to sell the premises for something else.