THE new owners of the Stillorgan Shopping Centre in Dublin are to organise an architectural competition to provide additional car-parking and extra retail space at the centre. As expected, Castle Market Holdings has completed the purchase of the centre and three other properties for £45 million. Dublin property developers Richard Barrett and John Ronan initiated the purchase for Castle Market Holdings, a joint venture company between Treasury Holdings and the UK-based Jermyn investment company. The portfolio acquired from Bank of Ireland Pension Fund includes the 30-year-old shopping centre, which has a rent roll of over £3 million, and the adjoining Baumanns yard, which will make it easier to provide extra car-parking. The package also included Blakes restaurant and two other restaurants on a 1.5-acre site which provides a current rent of £300,000. A fourth element was an office block at Tara Street, Dublin 2, which is rented by Dublin Corporation at £225,000 per annum. The £8 per square foot rent is currently under review and the lease has another 20 years to run. The overall yield from the portfolio at this stage is slightly under 8 per cent.

Castle Market Holdings is to commission five architectural practices to produce a practical plan which will include a 400-space multi-storey car-park and a further 20,000 square feet of retail space. The overall plan will include an upgrading of the centre, which has top class tenants but has changed little in recent years. Ian French of Hamilton Osborne King handled the sale for the pension fund, which decided that the centre represented too high a percentage of its overall property portfolio.

Mr Barrett is currently in the UK carrying out due diligence on almost 50 investment properties which are to be sold by a British insurance company for about £80 million.