The office block and an adjoining house on Herbert Road were offered for sale two years ago at €30m but failed to sell, writes JACK FAGAN.
A KEY REDEVELOPMENT site in the centre of Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, has come on the market on the instructions of a receiver for a property investment company.
The directors of Pressaro Ltd are named as property investors Simon Kelly and John Walsh.
Ross Shorten of agent Lisney is seeking offers in the region of €9.5 million for the former Cablelink office building which adjoins the Herbert Park Hotel at 20 Pembroke Place, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.
The same office block and an adjoining Edwardian house on Herbert Road were offered for sale two years ago at €30 million but failed to sell.
The two-storey office building is vacant and dates from the early 1980s when it was occupied by Cablelink and later NTL. The most recent tenant, AIB, paid an annual rent of €514,144 under a short term lease which recently expired.
The building has a floor area of 1,400sq m (15,070sq ft) and, according to Lisney, could be let in the short to medium term until the office market recovers. The agency suggests that, in the meantime, planning permission could be sought to demolish it and replace it with a substantially larger building.
The site of 0.4 of an acre has a surface car-park for 12 cars and a landscaped garden at the rear side. A redeveloped building would obviously include a car-park at basement level.
Developers with an interest in the well located property will obviously be looking at the prospect of enlarging the site further by buying-in some of the houses at the bottom end of Herbert Park which could possibly bring the overall site up to over an acre.
Even as things stand, new owners could expect to get planning permission for a high density office or apartment scheme given that the adjoining office, hotel and apartments overlooking Herbert Park are generally seven storeys. That permission was granted before the authorities came out in favour of high rise buildings rather than a continuation of the present suburban sprawl.
Despite the change of policy, planning permission has not yet been granted for a tower block on any of the hugely expensive sites assembled nearby by Sean Dunne, Ray Grehan and Gerry Kelly.
The obvious buyers for the former Cablelink building would be neighbours Sheelin McSharry who developed the Herbert Park Hotel and adjoining scheme but the firm has been largely inactive in the Dublin property market in recent years apart from completing a long running apartment scheme in Terenure, Dublin 6W.
The Herbert Park Hotel forms part of the former 5.5-acre Johnston Mooney O’Brien site at Ballsbridge which Telecom Éireann bought for £9.4 million in 1990 and later sold at a substantial loss to Sheelin McSharry. The purchase of the site in 1990 unleashed a chain of financial and political events which was ultimately a factor leading to a motion of no confidence in the leadership of former taoiseach Charles Haughey.
Early in 1995 Sheelin McSharry was able to sell 70 apartments at the scheme, from a hastily assembled office on site, with buyers queuing outside for one-bedroom apartments priced from £60,000 – considered very strong money at the time.
