Value of Dublin office deals beats top UK regional cities by 78pc
WHEN it comes to Dublin’s economic standing internationally, its detractors tend to pitch the capital at the level of a UK regional city.
A new report on the European office market shows that view is incorrect, with the capital outstripping the combined performances of Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh by a massive 78pc.
An analysis of the office sector across all four cities by Knight Frank’s head of research, John Ring, shows that some €148.6m is spent annually on letting space in Dublin — or €65.1m more than the €83.5m spent across the three UK cities
While the finding is significant in itself, it is all the more remarkable when one considers Dublin’s population of 1.2 million alongside the combined 5.6 million strength of Manchester (2.6 million), Birmingham (2.5 million) and Edinburgh (500,000).
In terms of the overall European office market, Dublin ranks as the ninth most valuable city for lettings annually, sitting just behind Moscow (€158.4m) and Warsaw (€150.9m), but ahead of Madrid (€138.8m), Milan (€116.8m) and Amsterdam (€99.0m).
The analysis, which is included in Knight Frank’s latest quarterly Dublin Office Market Overview, reaffirms London’s status as Europe’s leading city, with some €1.1bn in office lettings recorded annually.
Separately, Knight Frank’s report shows that deals covering 900,713 sq ft of office space were transacted in Dublin the three-month period to the end of June. The figure brings the overall take-up for the first half of this year to 1,648,548 sq ft. While this level of activity was in line with the same period in 2017, the contribution of new office builds in 2018 has been significant, with all five of the top transactions in the six months to the end of June involving schemes that were either recently delivered or are currently under construction.
Elsewhere, Knight Frank’s analysis reveals that Dublin city centre accounted for a massive 78pc of all space let in the Dublin office market in the second quarter.
Dublin 4 increased its share of the capital’s office market considerably, going from just 1pc in the first quarter to 26pc, following Google’s decision to acquire the entirety of the €300m Boland’s Quay scheme.
The US-headquartered web giant is set to take up 220,732 sq ft of office space at the development, which is located in close proximity to its existing EMEA headquarters on nearby Barrow Street where it occupies a complex of 508,500 sq ft distributed across the Montevetro Building, Gordon House, Gasworks House and Grand Mill Quay.
Google’s significance to the Dublin office market is even more pronounced when one considers that the next highest shares of transactional activity in the second quarter came in at just 10pc and 7pc respectively in the city’s south suburbs and fringe.