Central Belfast has looked like a giant building site in recent years but next week the hoardings will finally come down on the largest and most eagerly anticipated of its new developments.
Victoria Square, a 14-acre open-plan retail scheme lodged between the Waterfront Hall and the traditional shopping centre of Donegal Place, will increase shopping space in the city by a third when it opens for business next week.
With 98 shops, including anchor tenant House of Fraser's four floor flagship store, an eight-screen cinema and up to 15 restaurants, letting agents Savills says it will become the new heart of the city. "It's a very, very different scheme, even to what we have in Ireland. It's an extension of the street scheme. Anybody will be able to walk through it at any time. There are no doors and no gates although it's covered at high level," says Savills' Anne Marie Murphy.
About 70 per cent of shops will be open at launch and 93 per cent of units are already let.
Major brands include Topshop, which is moving from its current home on Donegal Place, H&M, French Connection, Reiss and Cruise. Footfall, according to the measurement company CACI, is expected to be in the region of 17.2 million a year.
Greater Belfast has a catchment area of about 700,000 people so the scheme's developer, Multidevelopment, is banking on southern shoppers to make up numbers. Commercial director Mike O'Hagan predicts that about 40 per cent of shoppers will come from the South.
A strong euro, coupled with the opening of the island's first Ikea store, has put Belfast back on the map as a shopping destination, he says.
"Northern Ireland, in particular Belfast, is more accessible than ever before," he points out. "It now takes just two hours travelling from Belfast to Dublin. We're targeting all the southern Ireland bank holidays with a £1.5 million marketing campaign."
Southern retailers have been a little slower off the mark with just a handful taking concessions at bigger stores and a couple of franchises, including O'Briens.
"While we'd love to have Dunnes and Primark , for example, there isn't the facility in the footprint for those schemes. They all command about 100,000sq ft and our anchor tenant swallowed up all of that. But we are still progressing opportunities for our basement with southern retailers," says O'Hagan.
Part of the problem, according to Savills' Murphy, is when rates are included Belfast is a more expensive proposition. Rents are comparable to, say Dundrum or Liffey Valley, at about £240 per square foot in the Zone A area which stretches 15 feet from the door. Rates in Belfast, however, are between 40-50 per cent of rent on average compared to about 15-20 per cent in Dublin.
"They need to build that into their business plan," says Murphy. "There is still that lack of knowledge about what Belfast is and what it's about. Ikea raised the interest, you can see the Victoria Square dome even when driving on the outskirts of town. The residential boom last year also helped. People are realising 'gosh, there has to be money to be made in Belfast'," she says.
Murphy is close to signing up several new southern Irish retailers, including a health and fitness operator. Many of those she started talking to when Savills first came on board more than three years ago are finally paying attention.
Victoria Square is the first significant retail development in the centre of Belfast since the opening of Castlecourt, near Donegal Place, in 1989. Then night-life in the city centre was minimal and even daytime excursions meant running the gauntlet of repeated security searches. The change has been slow in coming which explains the buzz about Victoria Square. It's more than just a shopping centre.
"We have city living now and a late night economy that we never had before, with all the key multinational brands trading well into the late evening. There are over 33,000 hotel beds in the greater Belfast area. In terms of long weekends, we're seeing significant growth," says O'Hagan.
"We're now ranked fifth in the UK for best retail conditions and retailer confidence. We have planes from 14 European destinations flying into Belfast every day. We have 27 cruise ships coming into Belfast and something like six million tourists predicted over the next year."
Despite the so-called credit crunch, dire warnings of a downturn in the global economy and a property market that is stagnant at best, O'Hagan is determinedly optimistic.
The first phase of apartments attached to the scheme has sold out and interest is strong in the next phase.
"Because Belfast is within an island we haven't been hit completely by the credit crunch and the down turn. We're not expecting to be hit by that. I think people are a bit more aware of how they're spending their money but people are saving it for the opening of this scheme.
"Belfast is buzzing and it's back in business."
