The board of the Jurys Doyle hotel group is to decide shortly whether it is to sell all or part of its seven-acre site in Ballsbridge. Jack Fagan reports.
The site of the three hotels owned by the Jurys Doyle Group in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, has been valued at around €200 million in advance of the company's decision on whether or not to sell part or all of the seven acres.
The board is due to decide shortly on the future of the four-star Jurys Ballsbridge and the five-star Berkeley Court and The Towers following a disappointing trading performance over the past year.
One option would be to sell the mainly low rise Jurys Ballsbridge which dates from the 1960s.
The 303-bedroom hotel stands on a site of almost 4.5 acres including a large car-park which is seen as poor utilisation of a very valuable site. If it decides to put this site on the market, it would easily fetch around €130 million, according to a leading valuer.
Most of Dublin's top property developers would be certain to pitch for it because of the likelihood that the planners would allow a high rise development of apartments or offices - or both - given the height of adjoining office buildings.
The planners might also favour the development of a number of retail units opening onto Pembroke Road to heighten a village atmosphere in Ballsbridge.
The €30 million-plus per acre valuation for the land is based on the assumption that the planners would allow up to 100 apartments per acre. Unit costs would work at €300,000 per apartment - a modest enough figure in comparison with some of the apartment sites in the docklands which have a valuation of €225,000 each.
One expert suggests that rather than opting for a high density apartment scheme, many developers would be likely to settle for 50 or 60 large units per acre which would fetch premium prices because of the location.
An estate agent specialising in development sites yesterday described the hotel site "as easily the best top end apartment site in Dublin".
Nobody knows that better than Jurys Doyle, which is expected to maintain at least one hotel on the Ballsbridge site.
The company recently upgraded The Towers, the 107-bedroom hotel between Jurys and the Berkeley Court, which has 187 bedrooms.
The decision to re-evaluate its use of the Ballsbridge site comes at a time when Jurys Doyle is considering the future of its four and five star hotels in Dublin because of increased competition at the top end of the market. While its three-star Jurys Inns have been hugely successful, its top end hotels have faced tough competition from hotels such as the nearby Four Seasons and The Merrion in the city centre.
At the company's recent AGM, chairman Richard Hooper told shareholders that the "performance across our Dublin hotels was very disappointing".
He blamed the tough trading environment on an oversupply of hotel rooms in the city.
Jurys now earns 60 per cent of its operating profit from the UK where it has more than 3,600 bedrooms compared to 2,700 in Ireland.
The United States market where Jurys has a further 760 bedrooms contributes a further 11 per cent of group profit.
