Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) has included Facebook’s new Dublin headquarters in one of five property portfolios it is selling off with a combined starting price of €600m (£372m),
The organisation has hired property agents CBRE and JLL to handle the sale which is being advertised as five packages but could, Nama admits, be broken down into smaller chunks or sold as individual assets.
Included alongside Facebook’s giant’s Grand Canal Square headquarters is 120,000 sq ft of prestige “Silicon Docks” office space let to Google and a clutch of software start-ups. Among the other assets are five shopping centres, several regional hotels and 600 apartments in seven locations across the capital.
Facebook’s 120,000 sq ft European hub only opened for business this June and doubled the company’s presence in the Irish capital, increasing its workforce to over 500. It has a ten year lease on Four Grand Canal Square and is already known to be looking for additional space.
The building is yards from the Bord Gais Energy Theatre, which changed hands this week for €28.5m (£17.6m). A sister building to the Facebook offices — One Grand Canal Square — was sold for €93m (£57.6m) nearly a year ago. Given the increase in Dublin commercial property prices, experts have put a minimum value of €120m (£74m) on the Facebook block should it be sold separately.
As part of a parallel strategy, Nama is assembling the loans from hundreds of smaller developers prior to selling them off as multi-borrower portfolios.
Previously, the agency has disposed of large portfolios linked to one borrower, such as the €1.8bn (£1.1bn) Project Tower portfolio tied to developer Michael O’Flynn and controversially taken over by US firm Blackstone. Its latest offerings will be packages of loans from dozens of unrelated debtors who owe millions rather than hundreds of millions of euro each.
“At one stage, if you were bringing along a sale for less than €200m (£124m) there just wasn’t the interest,” admitted Nama’s chief executive Brendan McDonagh.”That is now changing,”
And attempting to allay post-recession fears over large-scale investment by American individuals and funds, he added that Irish property firms and builders — many of whom will have debts included in the cluster sell-offs — had nothing to worry about should their loans be sold to trans-Atlantic equity managers.
“Individual debtors whose loans are sold can benefit if they understand the funds,” McDonagh said. “You can work with these people. They will stick with you if they think you can make them money.”
Previous Post
Demand rises in Taipei Office Market
