Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

Ms Marie Hunt:

Sorry, 2007. What I mean by prime is that we are comparing apples with apples. That was a prime unit on Grafton Street at that point in time and we tracked that headline rent over time. It was a period in time when a significant number of UK multiples were coming in to the Irish market and invariably they all wanted to be on Grafton Street so there was more demand than supply. It is a limited street so they were paying higher and higher rents. It got to the point when we were at €10,000 per square metre zone A we were not dissimilar to the Champs-Élysées. At that point we began to realise the benefit of being part of an organisation like CBRE is that one can compare and contrast apples with apples across different jurisdictions and it was obvious to us that this was overly expensive. However, people were willing to pay that. It is like the valuation argument in that once one or two tenants come in, they pay a very high rent and that becomes the new market rent for that street. It is self-perpetuating.

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