£8m expansion planned for shopping centre

Cork businessman, Clayton Love Jr is expected to embark on an £8 million expansion of his recently acquired Douglas Village Shopping Centre in the south-east suburbs of Cork city.

This follows the £3.5 million extension already under way at the nearby Douglas Court Shopping Centre, which he also owns. He is also involved in developing another shopping centre at Blackpool in Cork city at a cost of between £10 million and £12 million.

Mr Clayton Love developed and then sold the Douglas Village Centre in 1990 and re-acquired it last month from Owen O'Callaghan for around £8 million. Excluding its Tesco anchor store, the Douglas Village centre is generating £890,000 in rent from its 44,000 sq ft of retail space. The centre has 40 units including a library and post office.

The proposed extension of Douglas Village will follow a 13,000-sq-ft extension of the 116,000-sq-ft Douglas Court, a short distance to the east of the Douglas Village centre. The rent roll on the 59,000 sq ft of retail space in Douglas Court, excluding the anchor store, is in the region of £1.3 million.

The Douglas Court had an estimated 4.5 million shopping visits in 1998 and was the first suburban location in Munster to attract the UK multiples, Next and Boots.

The extension to Douglas Court is to be anchored by an 8,000-sq-ft department store run by McCauley's Chemists, which will include a beauty salon and treatment rooms at first floor level. McCauley's will spend an estimated £1.2 million in fitting it out.

The Douglas Court extension includes a further two units in the first phase. Work starts next month on a second phase of an 11,000-sq-ft development of five further units at Douglas Court. Also in Douglas Court, the anchor, Dunnes Stores, is spending £1 million in a refurbishment of its store.

The owners also report that several other occupants in Douglas Court are extending and upgrading their premises.

The two shopping centres have benefited from the major growth in the suburban hinterland to the south east of Cork. There were only seven shops and four pubs in the East Douglas Village and West village in the mid-1960s. There are now 240 businesses in the commercial centre of the area.

An estimated 250,000 shopping trips are made to Douglas Court each week, and the Dunnes Stores is one of the company's busiest outlets.

There is an estimated 350,000 sq ft of retail space in the Douglas area, and developers expect further residential and commercial development with the opening of the River Lee tunnel. Mr Clayton Love said he expects the residential expansion in the south-east Cork area over the past three decades will continue and even increase. "Despite intermittent ups and downs in the last 30 years, there has been great growth in the area and by 2020 it will be a much larger conurbation with very probably much more growth in the next 20 years than that which has occurred in the last 30 years - thus our re-purchase of the Douglas Village Shopping Centre to operate in conjunction with the Douglas Court Centre."

Mr Clayton Love is also involved in the building of a new shopping centre in the Blackpool area in the north of Cork city. The anticipated development costs of the shopping centre, on a site at Pole Field in Blackpool, is between £10 million and £12 million. Negotiations are under way for an anchor tenant.

This development includes a 65,000-sq-ft supermarket, negotiated before the present Government capping on food outlets, 20 units and parking for 500 cars. The Blackpool Shopping Centre is due for completion later this year.

He also developed the Wilton Shopping Centre in Cork in 1979 and then sold it on to the Irish Pension Fund and Property Unit Trust (IPFPUT).