Having weighed the prospect of bringing PwC’s headquarters on Dublin’s North Wall Quay to the market for more than €265 million in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, the building’s owners have decided to put it up for sale now with joint agents JLL and CBRE at a much-reduced guide of €170 million.
The figure represents a 36 per cent drop on the price that had been mooted for One Spencer Dock four years ago and a 30 per cent reduction on the €242 million Middle Eastern investors paid to acquire it through London-based AGC Equity Partners in June 2016. The US-headquartered real estate firm, Hines, had been expected to purchase the complex with the support of German pension funds at the same value, but withdrew from the deal two months earlier after almost three months of negotiations and due diligence. The €242 million sale price set a record for the Dublin office market with a capital value of just under €1,068 per square foot.
The nine-storey over-basement PwC office complex has an overall floor area of 21,054sq m (226,624sq ft) and was developed in 2007 by the now-defunct Treasury Holdings, the company formerly led by Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett.
One Spencer Dock is let to PwC under a 25-year lease with upward-only rent reviews every five years. The lease has about seven years left to run, and PwC is understood to be paying an annual rent of about €11.9 million, or about €52 per square foot.
Although the property’s €170 million price tag will be seen as ambitious in a market where other, newer office properties in Dublin’s north docklands have been selling at even steeper discounts, the proposed sale of One Spencer Dock is, notably, not being conducted on behalf of receivers. The building’s current owners funded its 2016 purchase with five-year loan facilities from ING Real Estate and DekaBank amounting to €144 million, or €56 million and €88 million respectively.
Where receivers have been involved in office sales, the price reductions have been heavy. Only last month, The Irish Times reported on the expected sale of No 2 Dublin Landings for about €50 million to German investor MEAG. The price represents a precipitous 53 per cent fall on the €106.5 million building’s outgoing owners, South Korean real estate investment trust JR AMC and Hana Financial Investment paid to secure ownership of it in 2018.
The 100,546sq ft office building forms part of the wider one million square feet mixed-use Dublin Landings scheme Sean Mulryan’s Ballymore developed in partnership with Singaporean-headquartered Oxley.
