IRISH DEVELOPER Treasury Holdings said yesterday that it hopes to begin work on the first phase of the Ballymun Town Centre regeneration in 12 months time if it can pre-let the facility and secure funding of €40 to €50 million for the building costs.
This will involve the construction of a shopping centre and possibly, some leisure facilities, including a cinema.
Treasury hopes that Tesco, which has an ageing supermarket in the area, will agree to be an anchor tenant in the new facility.
Niall Kavanagh, the Treasury executive in charge of the Spring Cross scheme in Ballymun, told The Irish Times that his immediate focus is to secure tenants on a pre-let basis for the shopping centre. “Once we have the pre-lets, and given the quality of the scheme, I think the funding will follow,” he said.
Treasury yesterday secured full planning permission for Ballymun Town Centre, which will have a construction cost of €400 million and comprise 255,000sq m of apartments, retail, leisure and civic facilities.
The site covers 15 acres. The land is owned by Dublin City Council but Treasury has a long leasehold on the current outdated shopping centre.
Treasury secured the permission on behalf of Real Estate Opportunities (REO), an associate listed on stock markets in Dublin, London and the Channel Islands.
It is not clear if Treasury will be able to secure funding for the project given the global credit crunch and the recession here. The Ballymun project is also tipped to be transferred to Nama, the state agency charged with managing bank toxic loans.
In its interim results for the first six months of this year, REO said it had total borrowings of £1.6 billion at the end of June and revealed that it had breached covenants on a loan of £226 million.
The value of its portfolio fell by 15 per cent in the period to just over £1.6 billion and there was a deficit on consolidated shareholders equity of £88 million.
In spite of this, the directors said they had a “reasonable expectation” that REO would be able to “meet its liabilities as they fall due for at least 12 months”.
Mr Kavanagh declined to comment on REO’s financial standing but said talks with banks in relation to Ballymun were under way. “We have relationships with all the major funders,” he added.
Ciarán Murray, managing director of Ballymun Regeneration Limited, the entity charged by Dublin City Council to manage the masterplan for the suburb, acknowledged that there are potential financing issues.
“The funding of it in the present climate will be difficult but the fact that there are opportunities to develop parts of it [at a time] will help,” he said.
Mr Murray said the proposed Metro North rail link would boost the town centre project.
In relation to the construction of 360 apartments, Mr Murray said that “realistically, that would be a slow process” given the decline in the residential market.
