MDL plans 22-storey; forests to offset office emissions; and no recovery in office rents until 2024

Motor Distributors, the family-owned group that controls the Mercedes franchise for Ireland, has asked Dublin City Council to relax height restrictions in a proposed development plan to allow it to accommodate a 22-storey tower as part of the redevelopment of a 15-acre site near the Naas Road in Dublin, to include offices and apartments. Mark Paul has the story.

Iput, the leading Irish property investment group and developer, is close to agreeing a forestry initiative to offset carbon emissions from its portfolio of offices in Dublin as it seeks to meet its net zero climate targets. The landholding near Mitchelstown in north Cork stretches to about 100 acres and is covered with deciduous and native trees. "We're not buying carbon offsets off the shelf from some Amazonian forest that we don't know about. We're actually generating the carbon credits domestically," Iput chief executive Niall Gaffney told Ciarán Hancock.

The value of development land sales in Ireland last year rose 11 per cent to €648 million, according to a new property report from the agency Savills, with almost six out of every ten deals for sites in the buoyant residential sector.

Glen Dimplex, the heating and industrial group controlled by the Naughton family, has bought UK software business SmarterDM, which specialises in systems to help hotels and other large businesses minimise their energy consumption by using software and other technology to control heating. Mark Paul reports.

Credit Suisse denies wrongdoing after huge leak of data on clients

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Hybrid working enters a new dimension: the third space

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Harcourt Developments considering sale of six shopping centres

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Ryanair to hire 150 staff as it prepares to expand flights from Dublin Airport

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The British building materials Breedon Group that acquired Northern Ireland's Lagan group in 2018 is investing £5 million (€6 million) to double capacity at a Lisburn tile plant to make concrete roof tiles.

How have we let housing, a basic social commodity, become one of the most divisive issues on the planet? There is perhaps no one answer to this, but there are several partial explanations, which Eoin Burke-Kennedy explores in his column today.

Also writing about the housing crisis in Opinion, Mark FitzGerald of Sherry FitzGerald predicts Ireland may need to double its housing stock in the coming century. "It took imagination to solve the Northern Ireland problem, to build up Aer Lingus, the IDA, and our education system, and we now require the same type of imagination in the area of housing," he says.

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