An Irish property developer is lining up his re-entry into the office construction market after nearly €400m (£320m) of his personal debts were transferred to the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) during the financial crisis.
Johnny Ronan has confirmed he wants to buy a key Dublin site — beside the city’s former Burlington Hotel — for €40m-plus (£32m) in a joint venture with mainland investment company Development Securities. The site already has full planning permission for 166,668sq ft of office space.
Widely regarded as one of the best commercial sites still available in the city, the Burlington Road plot is being marketed by CBRE with a guide price of €25m (£20m). It contains a five-storey, 75,573sq ft building and has been vacant since it was sold by Allianz Insurance to developer Bernard McNamara for €105m (£84m) in 2007.
Offices on Burlington Road have been attracting a number of leading companies over the past year including Amazon, BSkyB, AdRoll and Jazz Pharmaceuticals. And the Z6 zoning of the land within Dublin City Development Plan provides for “the creation and protection of enterprise and facilitate opportunities for employment creation”.
Should Ronan and his partner be successful in acquiring the site they will have the option of either developing a prestigious standalone Grade A building or two distinct and separate blocks designed by leading architects Henry J Lyons. The expectation is that they will opt for a single headquarters block, with a parking basement for 95 cars, and likely to cost between €40m and €45m (£32m and £36m). Completion is unlikely before 2016.
The developer has, for several months, been seeking to exit NAMA by selling a number of assets to repay his personal company debts.
Around €400m of his personal loans transferred to the agency are being reduced at full price following the sale of his investments. His UK partner, Development Securities, has also undertaken to buy out his remaining debts at par, leaving Ronan free to move back into Irish construction which he dominated for more than two decades.
Ronan and his Treasury Holdings partner, Richard Barrett, were responsible for the vast majority of the large-scale, pre-crash office projects in Dublin including the 700,000sq ft Central Park; the 100,000sq ft high-rise Monte Vetro which has now been sold to Google; the 200,000sq ft Connaught House and the Bank of Ireland headquarters on Burlington Road. The company’s first serious project, and from which it took its name, was the Treasury Building on Grand Canal Street — and which now houses NAMA’s headquarters.
In October, 2012, the High Court appointed liquidators to Treasury Holdings and its 16 related companies. The move followed a decision by both its directors not to resist a winding-up application by one of its banks, KBC, over a €55m (£44m) debt. In all the company had had debts of €2.7bn, more than €1.7bn of which was owed to the National Asset Management Agency.
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