Shortage of Grade A office space in suitable locations

A NEW STUDY of the Dublin office market by CBRE has shown that companies looking for more than 9,290sq m (100,000sq ft) of Grade A space in the city have only eight options available to them.

The report acknowledges that there is a large volume of high quality space currently available but, predictably, not all of it is located where occupiers want to move to and much of it is too small for many of the companies looking for accomodation.

Nevertheless, almost 70 per cent of all office stock currently being marketed is categorised as Grade A specification. This equates to almost 557,000sq m (more than 5 million sq ft). The average take-up in the Dublin office market over the past 10 years has been around 150,000sq m (1.615 million sq ft) per annum. Of the 62 Grade A office schemes available in Dublin 2 and 4 only four have floor areas in excess of 9,290sq m (100,000sq ft).

Marie Hunt, head of research at CBRE, said the fact that there were no new office schemes in the development pipeline and unlikely to be any speculative projects until at least 2014 meant that companies wanting to locate a large number of staff in a single building in the central business district would have a limited choice. New office schemes would not be feasible until rental values started to increase.