Multinational backed Fine Grain Property is buying Dublin office block Connaught House from receivers appointed to part of developer Johnny Ronan’s business for more than €70 million.
Fine Grain confirmed the deal on Monday saying that it had agreed a deal with receivers Grant Thornton for below the original €80 million asking price.
Sources calculate that it is paying in the “low seventy millions” for the property.
The deal is Fine Grain’s biggest so far and brings its total investment in the Republic to €370 million and 21 properties.
Founded in 2016 by chief executive Colin MacDonald, who drew on his experience of Singapore’s property market, Fine Grain has mostly focused on assets outside Dublin, providing space for multinational clients.
Backers include French and Swiss-owned family offices, along with British and Singaporean investors. It will spend €10 million upgrading Connaught House’s building energy rating to A, from the current D1.
Kevin Mahony, Fine Grain’s chief financial officer, said the deal underscored its commitment to “generating superior returns for our investors”.
Connaught House tenants were paying €7.1 million a year to rent offices there, according to figures published by property dealers Cushman & Wakefield and JLL in April. They include Australian bank Macquarie, biopharma group Alkermes and estate agent CBRE.
Mr Ronan completed Connaught House on Burlington Road in Dublin in 2007, as the Irish property market neared collapse. He kept the building through the subsequent crash, when the State’s National Asset Management Agency (Nama) took control of his debts.
Mr Ronan settled with Nama in 2015 when Colony Capital and M&G Investments helped him clear his €290 million liability to the agency.
Connaught House was one of 11 Ronan properties to which AIB and Bank of Ireland appointed accountants Grant Thornton as receivers last year to recover €130 million in loans. They took over the debt from M&G Investments, one of the backers which bailed the developer out of Nama.
The banks appointed Grant Thornton with the consent of his firm, Ronan Group Real Estate. Assets included Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street in Dublin. The receivers put them up for sale earlier this year.
Mr Ronan is one of the country’s better-known property developers, through his own ventures and, with one-time business partner, Richard Barrett, as part of Treasury Holdings, which the High Court wound up in 2012.
Mr Ronan is building new homes and offices on the site of the old Ringsend bottling plant in partnership with construction group Lioncor and Nama.
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