Dunloe Ewart is involved in advanced negotiations to sell a 32-acre business park it had been planning to develop along the M50 at Finglas in Dublin 11. The property is understood to be valued in excess of £16 million (€20.32m).
Although details of the discussions were not available this week, the management of Dunloe Ewart is believed to be in talks to sell most of North Park to a UK-based company. There is planning permission for over 600,000 sq ft of own-door and headquarters offices, industrial space with offices and motor showrooms on the high-profile site which has frontage on to the busy North Road close to the M50 intersection.
Park Developments is developing a business park of around the same size at the rear of the Dunloe site and although it only moved in about six months ago, has already pre-sold and pre-let more than half the space on the drawing board.
The discussions on the sale of the proposed park come just as Dunloe Ewart has agreed terms on the sale of a whole range of investment properties in Dublin, Northern Ireland and the UK, with an overall value of over £150 million (€190m). Jones Lang LaSalle, which is handling the Dublin portfolio, said it was not in a position to comment at this stage.
Dunloe Ewart has indicated its intention to use the funds from the sales to buy back its shares. The move follows the purchase, by Mr Liam Carroll of Zoe Developments, of a 27 per cent stake in the company.
About £90 million of the sales agreed were in Britain and Northern Ireland while the remainder are accounted for by Dublin investment properties. By all accounts, Dunloe Ewart has got strong prices for the investment about to change hands, due in part to the strength of the covenants and also because of the scarcity of investment opportunities. For this reason it is thought unlikely that the company will now sell either Bloomfields Shopping Centre in Dun Laoghaire or The Mill Shopping Centre in Clondalkin, Dublin 22, which had guide prices of £9.57 million (€12.15m) and £10.5 million (€13.3m), respectively.
The three-year-old Bloomfields centre is producing £548,592 (€696,568) from 256 shops and 55 car-parking spaces. Tesco owns its 50,000 sq ft supermarket outlet in the centre. The Mill centre has a rent roll of £801,409 (€1.017m) from 36 shops, where anchor tenant Dunnes owns its 100,000 sq ft outlet.
The largest Dublin transaction in the portfolio was the £23.5 million (€29.84m) agreed for two Dublin office blocks at Harcourt Road and Harcourt Street, occupied by the public service.
The purchaser has not been identified but it is thought that the Office of Public Works was among those tendering because of its policy of buying buildings which they occupy under long leases.
The seven-storey, 32,800 sq ft office block at 4/5 Harcourt Road is let to the OPW at £382,600 (€485,800) per annum. The 35-year lease dates from 1980. The OPW is also the tenant of a four-storey over basement office block at 76/78 Harcourt Street which is producing £329,000 (€417,740) per annum under a 35-year lease from 1982.
Dunloe Ewart has also apparently agreed to sell five interconnecting four-storey over basement Georgian buildings at 28/32 Pembroke Street for £8.25 million. All of the houses are let to the Dublin Institute of Technology, for ten years as of 1997, at a rent of £260,000 (€330,130).
The company is expected to accept an offer of around £10 million (€12.7m) for five retail units at The Square Shopping Centre in Tallaght, Dublin 22, which are producing rents of £482,500.
Dunloe Ewart is also to get about £19 million (€24.1m) for eight industrial buildings in the Airways Industrial Estate beside Dublin Airport, which were bought from businessman Brendan McDonald in 1998 for £12 million (€15.24m).
The rent roll for these units is £1,026,035 (€1.3m) and the new owners can claim £3.8 million (€4.83) in capital allowances.
Two modern three-storey office blocks with 25,878 sq ft at Ninth Lock Road in Clondalkin, are currently under offer. Both blocks are let on 20-year leases from 1999, one to Dublin Corporation for £176,228 (€223,760), the other to the OPW at £160,186 (€203,390).
Jones Lang had been quoting a guide price of £6.8m (€8.63m) for both blocks.
One of the highlights of the UK sales were two office blocks at Blackfriars in London, which sold for £24 million sterling.
In Northern Ireland, the sales agreed so far include Ross's Court, a retail complex in Belfast city centre let to Argos at £400,000 (€507,895) per annum, which made £6.3 million (€8m).
