International clients expect easy access to central high-rise offices, hearing told

When international financial service providers land at Dublin Airport, they want to be in their offices within 30 minutes. They also expect those offices to be located in a large high-rise development, the Spencer Dock planning appeal hearing was told in Dublin yesterday.

Mr Killian O'Higgins, a director of the estate agency firm, Sherry Fitzgerald, and managing director of its associate, DTZ Sherry Fitzgerald, said international clients had a number of requirements. Many had heard of the Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC) and wanted to set up there, but the relatively modest appearance of the centre did not always live up to expectations.

"When these guys land at Dublin Airport, they want to get to their offices in 30 minutes - end of story. And they want to get back in 30 minutes," Mr O'Higgins said. He added that his firm had brought over partners from 13 DTZ branches throughout Europe and shown them around the Spencer Dock sites. The firm had also sought information on what kind of developments would be required to lure businesses associated with the financial services sector, information technology or research and development.

The answer his company got was that the international sector requires office space in large blocks. Requests for an area of 20,000 square metres would not be uncommon, but he was also aware of interest in areas of 50,000 sq m and 100,000 sq m. Currently, a large occupancy of space in the Dublin market would be in the order of 2,000 to 4,000 sq m. Mr O'Higgins said there is a current deficit of almost 300,000 sq m of office space in the city. Over the next decade, he was confident that the requirement for space would top one million square metres.

Mr O'Higgins said this posed a number of difficulties for Dublin. The local authorities and private enterprise in the suburbs were currently developing large blocks of space in a necklace of centres and science and technology parks at Blanchardstown, Parkwest and Citywest, among others. This meant that Dublin city will soon have to compete with the suburbs for its tenants.

This development would mirror the "suburbanisation" of the city, which had seen people moving out to new suburbs, thereby depriving the city centre of life and vibrancy, he said.

It would be a bad thing for the city, he maintained, if the commercial office space market was to follow that trend. In any event, the highly mobile international sector very often would not "travel the distance" and would go to other cities to be near an airport, possibly outside the country altogether.

In terms of the residential element of the plan, Mr O'Higgins quoted at length from articles in The Irish Times. These, he said, showed a declining number of apartments being built in the city centre, accompanied by housing shortages and rising prices. The residential element of the Spencer Dock scheme would breathe life back into the city.

In terms of residential development, he said the "market has a clear preference for height", a theory borne out by the price of apartments located higher up. "The higher you go, the more expensive it gets," he said.

He acknowledged, however, that some of the retail facilities to serve the proposal were contained in the Point Centre, outside the 52-acre site.