Dunloe Ewart expected to make over £90m in sale of 10 top investment properties

The Mill Shopping Centre in Clondalkin, Dublin 22, and Bloomfields Shopping Centre in Dun Laoghaire, are among 10 top class investment properties to be sold in the coming weeks by Dunloe Ewart.

John Moran and Margaret Fleming of Jones Lang LaSalle are handling the disposal of the portfolio, which is expected to make in excess of £90 million.

Dunloe Ewart plans to use the funds, along with the proceeds of the sale of two pivotal development sites in Dublin and Belfast, to buy back its shares. The move follows the purchase by Mr Liam Carroll of Zoe Developments of a 27 per cent stake in the company.

The sale of the 10 investments could not have come at a better time for the investment market. Most of the financial institutions are under considerable pressure to find good quality investments because of the huge flow of money into pension funds.

Although private investors have not been as active as usual in recent months, because of rising interest rates, there are still quite a number of them waiting in the wings for the right properties to come on the market.

A businessman recently outbid the institutions and paid £10 million for Canada Life House, a modern office block in Blackrock. The initial return will be 5 per cent.

All the properties in the Dunloe Ewart portfolio will appeal to the institutions because of the high quality of the buildings, their locations and the strength of the covenants.

Bloomfields Shopping Centre, which has a guide price of £9,570,000, is currently producing rents of £548,592. The three-year-old centre has 98,000 sq ft including a Tesco-owned supermarket of 50,000 sq ft. There are also 25 shop units and a 550-space car-park.

The Mill Centre in Clondalkin has a rent roll of £801,409 and a guide price of £10.5 million. Built in 1994, it has 140,000 sq ft with Dunnes Stores owning its own 100,000 sq ft premises. The balance of the space is occupied by 36 shops. The surface car-park has 700 spaces.

The third retail investment comprises five units at The Square Shopping Centre in Tallaght, Dublin 22, which are expected to make in excess of £9 million. There is a rental income of £482,500 from the five units with a combined square footage of 15,845 sq ft.

The rents of four of the units are due to be reviewed in the next few weeks. The tenants are Boots, Douglas Newman Good, Adams, Pizza Hut and Eircom. Investors will be able to claim capital allowances of £3.75 million.

Jones Lang is quoting a guide price of £14 million for a seven-storey, 32,800 sq ft office block at 4/5 Harcourt Road which is let to the OPW at a rent of £382,600. The 35-year lease dates from 1980.

The OPW is also the tenant of a four-storey over basement office block of 25,000 sq ft at 76/78 Harcourt Street which is producing £329,000 per annum under a 35-year lease from 1982. The guide price in this case is £10,125,000.

Five interconnecting four-storey over basement Georgian buildings at 28/32 Pembroke Street are expected to make around £8,820,000.

All are let to the Dublin Institute of Technology for 10 years from 1997 with a landlord or tenant break option after five years. The combined rent is £260,000.

The agents are guiding £6.8 million for two modern three-storey office blocks with 25,878 sq ft at Ninth Lock Road, Clondalkin. Both blocks are let on 20-year leases from 1999, one to Dublin Corporation for £176,228, the other to the OPW at £160,186.

The highest valued investment in the portfolio - eight industrial buildings in the Airways Industrial Estate beside Dublin Airport - is likely to make around £20 million, according to the selling agents. The units are let to the State agency Forfas (and sublet to Dakota, MTI and Lotus) under 35year leases from 1981 and 1982. The rent roll here is £1,026,035 but investors can claim £3.8 million in capital allowances.

The tenth investment going for sale, an advance factory at Mallow, in Co Cork, is let to the IDA for 35 years from 1984. The detached unit of almost 22,000 sq ft is producing £69,000 per annum. It is expected to sell for around £1.5 million.