Heuston South Quarter , Dublin 8

Shortly after receiving hugely positive publicity for our handling of the €367 million and €375 million sale-and-leaseback deals for the Allied Irish Banks Headquarters in Dublin, the Jones Lang LaSalle Investment Team won a competitive pitch for the ‘forward sale and leaseback’ of the eircom Heuston South Quarter project.

The first challenge presented by our client Osprey (the property development arm of eircom, Ireland’s largest telecommunications company) was to obtain the maximum price for the sale and leaseback of the new eircom headquarters, which was under construction.

The second challenge was to create a full marketing campaign in four weeks.

The third was to ensure that all legal and financial transactions on the project were completed in less than eight weeks, in order to meet Osprey’s December deadline.

The Jones Lang LaSalle team designed a series of innovative financial and legal structures to address the complicated technical issues involved in creating multiple leases for different areas of the proposed 19,920m2 building. This required working closely with the vendor’s legal team to explain how the various complex transactions would work. We also set up a designated internet site with the capability to manage the due diligence/legal aspects of the deal: this was the first web-based system of its type in the Irish commercial property sector.

We met each of Osprey’s key challenges in record time, including completing turnaround on the full marketing documents within fifteen days, rather than the client’s specified four weeks timeline. More importantly, we exceeded the client’s target thus achieving a record yield in this previously untested development area of the city.
 
The eircom headquarters, which is now completed, has recently been described in recent media reports as a “prime example of sustainable new development”.