Little more than 12 months after demolishing a dated Victorian-style office building at Hogan Place in Dublin's south inner city and replacing it with a new-generation block, developer McGarrell Reilly Group has sold the investment at a significant profit to an unnamed institutional investment fund advised by Credit Suisse.
The €56.3 million selling price agreed for the newly completed Sharp Building will come as a surprise even in the present buoyant market dominated by aggressive overseas funds. The €2.7 million rent roll to apply to the building will give the new owners a net yield of about 4.4 per cent.
The building is named after George Sharp, the 19th-century portrait figure painter who resided in Hogan Place
The six-storey, over-basement, grade A office building extends to 4,412sq m (47,500sq ft) and includes a 209sq m (2,250sq ft) coffee shop let to the Art of Coffee for €50,000 annually. The basement car park has 40 spaces along with parking for 56 bicycles and clubhouse-standard showers with changing facilities.
The block has been pre-let to Perrigo, a leading global healthcare provider, at a rent of €592 per square metre (€55sq ft). In the same street a broadly similar-sized building owned by Jones Investments is occupied by Stripe, the online payments company founded by brothers John and Patrick Collinson.
The original four-storey office building at Hogan Place was developed some 25 years ago by Seán Reilly, who spent what was then described as a small fortune (€4 million) on making it “cosy and likable”. The decision to use the same site to accommodate the top-quality Sharp Building will have greatly enhanced the returns for McGarrell Reilly.
The fourth-generation block designed by Gary O’Hare of KMD Architects had been expected to run up development costs of about €20 million. It has already transformed the streetscape, featuring a striking contemporary glazed facade, a double-height entrance lobby and the wide appeal of a cafe-deli.
The building is named after George Sharp, the 19th-century portrait figure painter who resided in Hogan Place.
Patrick Campion of HWBC and Peter Flanagan of Knight Frank acted for the McGarrell Reilly Group, while Jonathan Hillyer and Jane Dolan of Cushman & Wakefield represented the purchaser.
