Central Park office block in Sandyford quoting rent of €323 per sq m

Rent of €323 per sq m (€30 per sq ft) is being quoted by joint agents Knight Frank and CBRE for the latest office block to come on the letting market at Central Park in Sandyford, Dublin 18.

Developed by Green Reit, Building I will have cost about €40 million to develop and extends to 9,290sq m (100,000sq ft) over eight floors. It comes with 156 basement car-parking spaces, showers and changing rooms.

The L-shaped floor plates offer 1,273sq m (13,700sq ft) with full-height glazing. Architects Henry J Lyons has designed the floor plates in Building I to be free of pillars and columns – one of the first times this has been offered in the Dublin suburbs. This permits maximum efficiencies for the end user when it comes to dividing up the space. Building I will be ready for tenant fit out at the end of 2018.

Central Park is one of the top suburban office locations in the capital and is home to the likes of AIB, Vodafone, Salesforce, Sage, Hostelworld and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The 79,000sq m (850,000sq ft) of office space is 100 per cent occupied and there are about 7,000 people working and living in Central Park.

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AIB was the most significant recent letting at Central Park when it signed up for 14,701sq m (158,244sq ft) at Block H on a 20-year lease from May 2017 at a rent of €291 per sq m (€27 per sq ft) – or €4.8 million a year.

The bank’s “centre of excellence” in customer digital innovation is housed in the building which can accommodate up to 1,500 workers.

Central Park was originally developed in 1999 by Treasury Holdings, the property vehicle controlled by Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett, but it subsequently came under the control of Nama which sold it on to Green Reit and its then joint venture partner, Kennedy Wilson, early in 2014 for €310 million.

That deal saw Green taking possession of the offices and Kennedy Wilson assuming ownership of the apartments but Green acquired the 50 per cent stake in the park it did not own in 2016 for a figure reported to have been about €155 million.

Central Park now generates a rent roll of about €23.7 million and, excluding Building I, has planning permission to develop 27,870sq m (300,000sq ft) of office space on the remaining 4.5 acres of grounds. The development benefits from its proximity to the M50 and N11 while the Luas is a short walk away.

A number of companies renting space here are engaging in the practice of near-souring, whereby they move out of the city centre to take advantage of cheaper rents and centralise their operations. This has many advantages, particularly if the company has been spread over multiple locations.