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Whilst the planning situation should be quite straightforward in that the lease if recognising the use should by virtue of the user clause provide proof of the use as being creche since commencement of the term; however there is always a risk that the planners will either (a) dispute the use has occured for the entire period or (b) hit the applicant for levies or specific contributions for anything they can think of. The landlord probably doesn’t have an issue on compliance in that if it is a standard lease the tenant will have given an undertaking for indemnification of the landlord in respect of planning breaches; a landlord cannot penalise the tenant unless loss has been actually incurred.

If no local resident has complained personally I would concentrate on lowering the rental value as opposed to acheiving planning compliance as this clearly sounds like a decision based upon a pending or due lease renewal; however if enforcement has commenced your clients are exposed to costs unless they have an alternative location and play the scarce legal resources angle with the council after they have moved i.e. move to a location with the appropriate consents in place and remind the council that budgets are strained and that your client has desisted from any action requiring enforcement unlike he 100’s of billboards which despite being visually horrific appear exempt from any enforcement action. An informal chat with a planner would no doubt answer all of the requirements for a valid application.

@jimg wrote:

Don’t make me use the search function and start quoting you.

Oh I see; if it weren’t for the unfortunate reality of “today’s valuations”, McNamara would be in fine shape which means you were in fact correct? If my aunt had balls etc.

And no sort of convoluted illogical bluffing can justify dismissing the claim that what’s good for buyers of a service is bad for the sellers and vise-verse as being ludicrous. It’s not only NOT ludicrous, it’s so obviously true that a child can appreciate it. Anyone who uses the word “market” in a sentence but doesn’t appreciate this simple and fundamental fact is a bluffer.

You can look at my location; I made plans to leave the country in the weeks following the issuing of the bank guarantee having done some quick calculations particularly on the growing state deficit and state of Anglo’s balance sheet. I was gone 4 months later. Many thought I was being hysterical but the economic reality has actually turned out to be worse than I expected. I know for a fact I would be out of work in Ireland given my profession.

Ireland will end up with a staggering mountain of debt and a weak tax base. It isn’t difficult to crunch the numbers. This makes me sad and angry because some truly great things had been achieved in the country and I’d much rather living close to friends (even if many are crippled by negative equity) and family.

But what really pisses me off are the clowns who for the last 5 years have peddled “soft landing” theories, who declare the “bottom” of various markets at regular intervals and who berate people for “talking down the economy”. If the harsh reality had been tackled a little earlier (instead of, for example, advising economists who predicted melt-down to commit suicide or dealing with the banking crisis by claiming it was just a liquidity problem which would blow over instead of the solvency crisis which it was), the country might have had some chance. This happy-clappy fingers-in-the-ears approach to the country’s problems has actually multiplied its difficulties. At least most have come out of denial but it seems you’re still intent on peddling this baseless “analysis” and your proven-to-be-bollox predictions of an imminent silver lining for years.

A valuation is only a snapshot of what is acheivable on a given day; the purpose of NAMA was to remove the context of a market where there was no lending to underpin a sector that has in the recent past been based on leverage of 70% plus. It was always going to be a medium term project. You are gernerally better off with the people who bought the assets and had detailed knowledge of them having control rather than simply selling them into a market where all observers agree is below its medium term level. Signs in London are that prices are now at medium term levels; the levels of 2005/2006 will not be seen again for a very long time in terms of yield compression but rents are higher than those of 2005 for grade A space deliverable in 2010/2011. When you are advised by a financial advisor that an equity fund is a 5-10 year investment you do not liquidate it at the first sign of trouble you continue with the strategy you intended.

Fair enough you have left and as locations go Zurich is a pretty good spot to be in the financial industry. The choice of this location does however clearly display that you have an above average level of risk aversion; it is a location well outside the sphere of influence of the anglo-saxon model beyond recent attempts to lure hedge funds.

Your view is however overly pessimistic; yes there is a large fiscal hole; yes the unemployment figures are unimaginable when viewed with those of a few years ago. However the government has tackled the deficit in a much more credible manner than say the UK, unemployment is starting to stabalise and unlike many other countries there has been a sustained period of deflation across CPI, asset markets and service costs. What made Ireland attractive in the early 1990’s was a mix of a highly educated workforce seeking employment in a weak market being combined with cheap service costs in areas such as property, transport etc. What made Ireland uncompetitive was simply the reversal of these trends into a workforce of primadonnas when it came to pay and a property sector who thought rents should be on a par with Mayfair / Knightsbridge.

19 months after the bank gaurantee scheme was mistakenly launched the perception is that Ireland is a place you can do business, the government is one that does not let local interests screw foreign businesses: assets are perceived to be safe; rents have fallen below Edinburgh which is probably the most comparable competitior city and transport connections are plentiful and cheap in terms of serving a European territory. If the opposite were true why are key employers such as IBM still setting up top end projects.

I have never said that the levels of 2004-2006 will ever come back and I’ve no doubt the bond markets will be keeping a much closer eye on any lending that has the words Real Estate development as the purpose of the loan. But having enjoyed an unsustainable rise in asset values it is felt that an over-correction in prices has occured in many cases. Clearly the absence of supply will underpin the market going forward; it is a fact that many occupiers have a preference for better at an equivelent cost to current cost if they occupy dated buildings.

I would be very interested to see your predictions on office vacancy levels for 12 months time, unemployment levels for 12 months time and deficit as share of GDP for 12 months time.

They might want to add the letters U and K to their sneering P I I G S acronym, though that would spoil their fun now wouldn’t it, and perhaps a little too close to the truth for our British friends.

With that analysis I’m amazed you are still in the country; you seem to make Ireland look like Greece or Iceland. I have no issue defending Quinlan, I have never said that Quinlan, McNamara or anyone was solvent at todays valuations; what I did say was that what they bought was higher quality than average and that when the valuation uncertainty clears that they will be ok if patience is shown with their holdings. Now is just about starting to become to sell UK assets as there are more buyers than sellers; any asset sold this time last year would have sold for dramatically less than would be acheived today. In Ireland there is probably another year or two to go before investment yields come back to IPD averages but as I have always advocated selling prematurely solves nothing other than crystalising paper losses into actual losses. Equally I see value in the long term in the Irish Glass Bottle site; no question a public authority should not be investing in development land but the subject site is located close to Strand Road Dublin 4 has views over Dublin Bay and is proximate to the South Docklands; when residential markets recover units at this scheme will have a significant premium to Dublin averages.

You assertion that better terms for tenants equate to landlords having further difficulty is nonsense; each investor is holding a tenancy schedule that the bank values at net present value which is based on market rent clearly there are many properties where the rent reserved is significantly higher than what is acheivable in the market but this scenario is fully priced in. As supply dwindles rents will at worst stay where they are and for quality stock start to converge on IPD averages; this is not some snake oil prediction it is simply the way the market has always worked Internationally.

That is certainly the context in which it was raised but as there are likely to be few estates demolished and that most of those estates are likely to the small number of semi built suburban scale estates tacked onto villages in the border counties, you would wonder why he raised the issue other than to fly a kite for a wider role for planners in the overall process.

The return to original land use is a major issue in the Mid West US from what I have read where large tracts of land had services put in waiting for phased development and that land funds are now buying them and returning them to agricultural and alternative fuel production uses.

@CologneMike wrote:

Who Knows?????

I would be very surprised if this were to be knocked; hardly an architectural gem but no doubt a suitable secondary shopping centre to be sold to one of the many european retail property funds when fully or close to fully let; no doubt the retail catchment data highlighting the level of retail saturation and number of pre-lettings already signed will have a massive bearing; more likely that in the absence of a pre-let on the anchor store that a soft deal would be done with Dunnes or Tesco and that they would dictate the completion date. The environmental consequences of knocking that amount of concrete would be truely horrendous.

Prediction 1; they (AIB/BoI) will be a lot less volatile
Prediction 2; they will outperform the Eurostox 50 Index by at least 10%

Caveats

1. That predicted disposals are carried out on the terms envisaged
2. That the World economy continues to recover
3. That capital raising proves as successful as recently in the case of BoI; the Prudential rights issue due in May is the one to watch

I recently bought Irish bank shares for the first time in almost 2 years as my way of leveraging the recovery in the Irish economy; given the large lot size that prime commercial property represents direct investment is not an option to me and given that the quoted commercial property unit trusts mostly feature very secure income they do not present the type of returns that are on offer elsewhere; the core global markets are recovering at a pace. I have a strong feeling that Ireland will not be left behind.

The CBRE report is highly important as it highlights that take up has increased and that in the absence of a pipeline of new stock reaching the market that vacancy levels are in fact falling albeit slowly. You correctly identify sentiment or demand but make no mistake the supply side of the equation will take on a larger and larger importance; this was the tipping point in London earlier this year when an analysis of not just vacancy rates was undertaken but also what type of space was vacant; the clear finding was that there was literally no grade A space available that wasn’t pre-let and that although space was available it was in the main very poor space with poor energy ratings in poorly fitted out buildings.

There is a natural churn in any property market as occupiers move out of 10-25 year old buildings at lease expiry; the real question is what proportion of these firms will take new and vacant space and what proportion will take a new lease in their existing premises to secure lower rents. It is a trend that will determine the output of the construction sector and associated professions for the forseable future and will be a vital tool in business planning for anyone in the industry. Concentrate on sentiment alone at your peril..

There are one of two reasons for the refusal; they either don’t wan’t more licensed premises or as Tommy said they feel that the specific immediate area has traffic or pedestrian safety issues. If it is the former the logical thing would be to simply select another opportunity but to tease it out; I’d get a consultant to meet with them to see if specific contributions to specific measures could be agreed e.g. €10,000 towards a pedestrian crossing; if so it is a simple case of pricing the measures and working them into your viability analysis for the project. The only inherent risk is that the council grant PP, take the contribution and don’t do the works; when you apply for your license in the district court the absent safety measure could be used by objectors.

Its a while but when you look at the process

Planning = 18 months
Tender = 6 – 12 months

That takes you into early 2013 pre-commencement

Given that the line meets two existing lines that will extend the construction time given operational sensitivities; London’s Cross Rail went on site 12 months ago; they are targetting a completion date of 2017 albeit that it is a more complex project; on that basis 2018 looks about right in terms of deliverability.

This project would be great to magic from the air today but it will be worth waiting for in terms of the level of intergration that it delivers to existing services and areas of the City Centre currently underserved by public transport or served by mono-directional routings.