Developers OCP to sell on quay site by Cork's bus and rail stations

Going to market this week with agents Savills carrying a €4.25m-plus AMV is an assembled, but now long idle, river fronting site of 0.48 of an acre at Anderson’s Quay, Clontarf Street, and Lower Oliver Plunkett Street, previously occupied by Reliance Bearings and the Cork Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA), the city’s old ‘Cat and Dogs’ home’.

It has a lapsed planning permission for 150,000 sq ft of offices over ground floor retail, but may now find other uses, such as hotel, apartments, or another mix with offices in different and fresh hands.

It was put together around 2005 when OCP paid a then-reported €7m for the former 0.4acre Reliance Bearing building and site, following it up with a purchase and site swap with the CSPCA which O’Callaghans (OCP) relocated to a purpose built building in Mahon Point, next to the retail park anchored by B&Q. (The subject site doesn’t include the corner property previously occupied by sports retailer Tommy Maher and, before that, by Union Chandlery.)

The 1870s-founded charity CSPCA had been on Clontarf Street since 1936, but had spent years trying to find a better, bigger site before the deal with OCP, continuing OCP’s pattern of finding ‘solutions’ and new bases for companies it wished to move from valuable city sites, such as the Irish Examiner from Academy Street, and Johnson & Perrot from Emmet Place to enable the retail and apartment Opera Lane development.

Commenting on the move to sell the profile site by Clontarf Bridge after almost 20 years with no, or low value uses in the interim, a spokesperson for O’Callaghan Properties said “the decision to exit the Anderson’s Quay site will allow OCP to concentrate fully on the major Docklands projects on Kennedy Quay and the Gouldings site”.

“Both projects have City Council planning permissions and OCP is keen to deliver them as quickly as possible. Both are hugely ambitious undertakings, demanding full attention.”

Planning for offices on Anderson’s Quay was first secured in the mid 2010s around the same time that developer Owen O’Callaghan also moved to develop offices on the city’s south quays, at Navigation Square on 2.25 acres at Albert Quay, with c500,000sq ft in total proposed between them.

That move to the south quays has since been followed by even larger scale site assembly on the adjacent downriver Kennedy Quay, and along Centre Park Road in the hands of second-generation developer Brian O’Callaghan, taking over the reins after the death of Owen O’Callaghan in January 2017.

A spokesperson on Brian O’Callaghan’s behalf said “the multi-element Kennedy Quay project is a transformational development for Docklands and the city. The demolition of R&H Hall (grain silos) has gone very well and the complex work on the relocation of all public utilities — power, gas, water, telecoms, etc, — is now commencing.”

The removal of the 1930s era concrete silos from Kennedy Quay and retention of the red brick Odlums building façade is seen as key to a c €350m plan to further transform the South Docks from cargo and grain uses to include a rehabilitation hospital, office blocks, and apartment complex. Initial plans for a cinema were dropped, to allow 14 additional apartments: OCP were among the first in Cork to deliver cost rental apartments, for the last portion of its Lancaster Quay site.

A second strand of OCP’s docklands plan is to build 1,325 homes (primarily apartments to the rear of Kennedy Quay, on the Gouldings fertiliser site on Centre Park Road/Monahan Rd).

However, while planning for this is secured, it is contingent on Gouldings being able to relocate its fertiliser base to Marino Point (coincidentally the old NET fertiliser plant) further downriver, a move that has been under An Bord Pleanála appeal for a lengthy, 18-month period.

Last week, that appeal prompted OCP MD Brian O’Callaghan to complain at a builders/CIF summit in Cork that the city’s docklands development was being tied up in lengthy planning appeals.

Guiding the c half-acre Andersons Quay site from €4.25m, Savills agents Peter O’Meara and James O’Donovan say it will suit a variety of uses, including an hotel or apartments.

Adjoining a long-established Simon Community shelter facility, and close to the currently stalled Prism triangle office site and Port of Cork site where plans for a 240-bed hotel tower of up to 34 storeys was also proposed by purchasers the US-based Tower Holdings Group, it’s close to Cork’s bus and rails

The site is also close to the city’s bus and railway stations which are set for vastly increased usage under TFI public transport plans.

It’s also proximate to existing hotels such as the Clayton at City Quarter, the Leonardo (ex Jurys Inn) on Anderson’s Quay, The Dean, as well as to other proposed ones at the Coliseum and Parnell Place where Tetrarch Capital achieved planning for a hotel in 2018 in old, ex warehouse red sandstone buildings.

Meanwhile, apartments are expected to begin construction on both the north (Horgans Quay) and south quays (Kennedy Quay, etc) after recent State funding supports to make high-density residential development financially feasible.

DETAILS: Savills 021-4271371