About Poolbeg Properties
Gerry Burke Kennedy and John Desmond have been close friends for many years now since playing football together in our 20s. Gerry has spent all his life interested in architecture,design and construction and John in banking, accounting and property. We decided to combine our talents and experience in Poolbeg Properties to build fine beautiful modern residential properties in Dublin.
We have a shared interest in design and a mutual ambition to build handsome buildings of which we can be proud. It was always our goal and ambition to establish a business that is design and quality orientated. We work at building beautiful homes in which people will be very happy to live.
We invest a lot of time and resources into designing and building our houses. We personally choose all the materials we use in a very hands on approach working together with architects and suppliers throughout the design and build process. We regularly travel abroad to choose these materials, and explore new products, design and technology.
Gerard Burke-Kennedy
Director
Gerard Burke-Kennedy has been involved in many building and restoration projects in Ireland, England and France over a 30 year period.
After a degree in Economics he started working with Sisks Construction, then trained as a carpenter and then moved on to small contracting jobs before buying, renovating and selling his first Dublin redbrick in 1989.
After that he spent 5 years as a contractor in California before returning to work for his friend and mentor, the late Dermot Pierce. Gerard was in charge of sales and marketing for the immensely successful Eastpoint Business Park in Dublin. He contributed to the agreements to bring Oracle and Cisco to the 40 acre office park that also has Yahoo and Google as its tenants. It now has 6000 people working in 50+ companies.
After that he set up as a self employed property developer building new modern houses or restoring old period,often Art Deco houses in Ireland,England and France.
Gerard has been involved with the design, project management and sale/letting of residential projects on behalf of other property developers and also as property consultant for clients in London, Paris and Berlin. He currently manages his own private portfolio in Ireland and France.
In recent years he has been working in partnership with John Desmond and they have developed residential schemes in Crumlin,Churchtown,Glasnevin and Clontarf.
John Desmond
Director
John Desmond has a BSc in Management from Trinity College and qualified as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG. John worked for 16 years in ACCBank, KBC Bank and Bank of Ireland. During that time he held various senior management roles including Head of Internal Audit, Chief Accountant, and Head of Intermediary Development.
From 2005 to 2012 John was Managing Director of Hanson Capital Management, a private property company with interests in Ireland, UK and USA. Assets owned or under management were excess of £500m.
In late 2012, John left HCM to develop his own business interests which include a UK student accomodation development partnership most recently involved in projects in Bournemouth and Reading, and Morleigh Finance (a debt restructuring advisory business).
He formed Poolbeg Properties Ltd in partnership with Gerard Burke-Kennedy and the business has been involved in developments in Crumlin, Churchtown, Glasnevin and Clontarf.