A joint venture syndicate has paid slightly over £25 million for 20 acres of commercial development land owned by a religious order, Legionaires of Christ, at Rocklands, Leopardstown, Co Dublin.

The site will be used for a huge office development which will have frontage on to the Southern Cross extension to the M50 motorway.

The underbidders are understood to have included two UK supermarket giants, Sainsburys and Safeway, who were banking on having the site rezoned to accommodate stand-alone retail complexes. There is considerable doubt that they would have got permission for retail use.

The scheme will be developed on a 50-50 joint venture basis between a company headed by David Arnold and another one controlled by Castle Market Holdings, whose £150 million portfolio in Ireland includes Stillorgan Shopping Centre.

Castle Market Holding is, in turn, a joint venture company of Jermyn Investments Properties in the UK and Treasury Holdings, controlled by John Ronan and Richard Barrett. The land sale is the largest and most important in the Dublin area in recent years. Although it is zoned for light industrial use, the strong price paid for it can only be justified if it is used for an office development.

Based on some of the planning permissions recently granted in the nearby Sandyford Industrial Estate, the developers will obviously hope to get at least 1.3 million sq ft of high tech offices which will be aimed mainly at computer industries.

The land is strategically located along the Leopardstown Road which is to be upgraded to a dual carriageway. The zoning of the land allows the planners to grant permission both for office use and retail warehousing. It adjoins the IDA Business Park and is directly opposite the Sandyford Industrial Estate. Lisney advised the Legionaires of Christ, which first offered the site for sale about eight years ago. It was not sold at that time but in recent years the order has had several approaches from developers. It was eventually offered for sale by private tender. The order still has 16 acres around its Leopardstown seminary but six of these are in the line of the Southern Cross.

With the office vacancy rate in the city now down to 3 per cent, the developers of the Leopardstown office park can expect to attract a range of foreign and local companies.