£1m-plus Georgian office could be townhouse

An unusually small Georgian building going for sale next month at 2 Clare Street, Dublin 2, may well be bought as a townhouse even though it has been in office use for decades.

Agents Hamilton Osborne King are quoting over £1 million for the house, which goes to auction on June 5th.

The five-storey building is about half the size of the average house on one of Dublin's Georgian squares, with a floor area of only 2,680 sq ft. It is no bigger than many of the large family homes that come on the market in the south Dublin suburbs. Several large Georgian buildings in the area have been converted back into residential use in recent years.

Whoever buys 2 Clare Street will need to spend at least £100,000 on upgrading it, but when the work has been completed, they will have a well-located house off Merrion Square.

There are four car-parking spaces to the rear, accessed from Lincoln Place.

One reason why the house may not revert to residential use could be the constant traffic passing through Clare Street. Parking is not allowed on the street, where the best known buildings are Greene's bookstore and the Mont Clare Hotel.

If it is bought as an office investment, 2 Clare Street could be expected to produce an annual income of between £75,000 and £80,000 once it has been refurbished, according to Duncan Lyster of Hamilton Osborne King. He estimates that it could be let at around £28 per sq ft, marginally lower than the £30 per sq ft recently achieved in Merrion Square.

Number 4 Clare Street, a 2,337 sq ft building, was let earlier this year to an Italian bank at £22 per sq ft - car-parking spaces made an additional £2,000 - but with office space in central Dublin becoming ever more scarce, rents are continuing to move up.

Lyster reckons that the upward movement in Georgian rents is a good barometer of the office market generally in the city.

The sharp rise in Georgian rents achieved over the past year has had a obvious knock-on effect on values. A Georgian office investment at 22 Merrion Square recently sold at auction for £3.8 million, even though the leases run out in July 2001. The 7,000 sq ft building is currently producing rents of £94,000, but the selling agents estimated that the full rental value is now £200,000.