Zara founder Amancio Ortega’s investment firm Pontegadea has bought a 6,344sq m (68,286sq ft) office building in Dublin’s south docklands for almost €70 million from US property group Kennedy Wilson and the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), according to sources.
The deal to buy Ten Hannover Quay, a grade A office development let out to US financial technology group Fiserv, closed last week, the sources said. It marks Nama’s final exit from the capital’s docklands, where it had been involved in the large regeneration programme for more than a decade.
A spokesman for Nama, which owned 40 per cent of the building, declined to comment, while representatives for Kennedy Wilson and Pontegadea did not respond to requests for comment.
Nama, which was set up in 2009 to acquire about €72 billion of risky and distressed commercial property loans from Irish lenders, saw its remit widened about 13 years ago to deliver thousands of homes and develop swathes of land in the docklands that had fallen under its control as underlying loans ran into trouble.
This included sites previously controlled by Treasury Holdings, developer Harry Crosbie and the now-defunct Dublin docklands Development Authority.
Nama would work with partners such as Kennedy Wilson and US investment firm Oaktree, two of the most active buyers of Irish property assets in the wake of the property crash, Singapore-headquartered Oxley Holdings and Irish building contractor Bennett Construction to develop the land.
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Nama and its partners have delivered 3.8 million sq ft of commercial space, 2,000 homes, retail, cultural and green space across 15 sites on either side of the river Liffey over the past decade.
The sale of Ten Hanover Quay comes just three years after Fiserv signed up as tenants for the entire building, a modern glass-fronted office block integrated into an 1880s docklands warehouse overlooking Grand Canal Dock.
Fiserv is paying €57.50 per sq ft, almost €3.93 million in total, a year, with a rent review scheduled for 2027, according to an information memorandum distributed by estate agents CBRE and Savills, who handled the sale of the building, which has a freehold title.
Nama, which paid a deeply discounted price of €32 billion to acquire loans from Irish lenders during the financial crisis, had reduced the carrying value of its loan book to €370 million and its investment properties portfolio to €373 million by the end of last September, according to its latest quarterly report. This follows large portfolio sales and Nama working with certain debtors to develop and offload projects over the course of its lifespan.
The remains of the agency, together with what remains of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, which is home to the remnants of Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society, are on track to move to a new resolution unit in the National Treasury Management Agency later this year.
Pontegadea, through which Mr Ortega holds most of his 59.2 per cent interest in Indetex, parent of Zara, Massimo Dutti, Pull & Bear and several other retailers, made its first foray into Ireland’s commercial property market in March 2022, paying just over €100 million for 120 apartments at Opus at Six Hanover Quay in Dublin’s south docklands.
It paid about €225 million for a big logistics investment at Dublin’s Baldonnell Business Park, including a centre used by Amazon, about 18 months later.
Between those dates, Pontegadea entered and, subsequently, withdrew from talks to buy part of Meta’s new Ballsbridge campus in Dublin for about €525 million.
