MR MARK Kavanagh's Hardwicke property company yesterday paid £6.2 million at auction for an office site of three-quarters of an acre, which has frontage on to Upper Hatch Street and Adelaide Road, Dublin 2. It is the highest price ever paid for a development site in Dublin - equating to £8.25 million per acre.

The cleared site was owned by Norwich Union which secured planning permission for two office buildings fronting on to each of the streets with a combined floor area of 87,000 square feet.

There were five bidders for the site when the auction opened at £3 million and rose in bids of £100,000 until it reached £4.1 million. At that stage, auctioneer Aidan O'Hogan, of Hamilton Osborne King, accepted further bids until the price hit £6.2 million. The entire auction took less than five minutes.

The high level of interest in the site follows record levels of office take-up over the last three years, according to Roland O'Connell of HOK. He said that at the end of 1996, there were only 576,000 square feet of office space in Dublin - the equivalent of 4 per cent of the total stock.