Eamon Waters snaps up Dublin 8 office block for heavily discounted €14m

Sretaw PE (Private Equity), the investment and property development company headed up by Eamon Waters, has completed the acquisition of the Chancery Building in Dublin city centre for about €14 million.

The price paid represents a discount of 43 per cent on the €24.75 million price that had been sought originally by agent Knight Frank when it brought the property to the market on behalf of its owner Credit Suisse, in September 2022.

Sretaw expressed an interest in purchasing the property after its asking price was reduced to €19 million last year. The €14 million paid by Mr Waters is some 41 per cent lower than the €23.8 million Credit Suisse paid Hibernia Reit to secure ownership of the property in 2017.

Located on Chancery Lane in Dublin 8, the Chancery building comprises a six-storey over-basement office block along with four two-bedroom apartments. The office element of the scheme extends to 3,185sq m (34,283sq ft) with secure basement car parking for 19 cars and further parking for bicycles.

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The offices are fully let to three tenants and are producing total rental income of €1,396,693 annually. Of the current rent roll, 69 per cent is being generated by State tenants.

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[ The top 10 commercial property deals of 2023 ]

The ground floor is let to Wella Studio, a hairdressing-training company that forms part of the wider Geneva-based Wella Company.

The first to fourth floors are let to the Office of Public Works and are occupied by the Chief State’s Solicitors Office (CSSO).

The penthouse floor is occupied by Analytic Partners, a privately held firm specialising in analytic solutions.

The four apartments are fully let to private tenants on a mix of rolling “Part 4″ and fixed-term tenancies. The rent roll of the residential units equates to €98,928 annually.

The Chancery building comes with planning permission to extend the floor area of the office accommodation by 914sq m (9,838sq ft) and, with a full Ber assessment aimed at bringing it to an overall B2 rating.

The property is located close to the 147-bedroom Chancery Hotel which Mr Waters’ Sretaw Hotel Group is in the process of developing on Ship Street Great.

Sretaw’s purchase of the Chancery building follows its acquisition from Iput last year of Victoria’s Secret’s flagship shop on Grafton Street along with Tesco’s premises on Lower Baggot Street for €28 million and €12 million respectively.

In July of last year, the Sretaw Hotel Group sought planning permission from Dublin City Council for a new 61-bedroom hotel on the site of Textile House, which Mr Waters bought after it was put on the market for €6.5 million. The building sits across the road from the Grafton Hotel on Johnson’s Place and Clarendon Market.

In September 2021, Mr Waters’s company paid €74 million to secure ownership of Royal Hibernian Way on Dublin’s Dawson Street from Aviva Investors.

That deal came just weeks after he and US private equity firm Blackstone secured the sale for €1.4 billion of the State’s largest waste company, Beauparc Utilities, to Australian financial services giant Macquarie.

The deal for the company, which owns the Panda and Greenstar waste firms in Ireland, is understood to have provided its founder, Mr Waters, with a windfall of about €367 million, based on company filings before the announcement.