200 Cork R&D Motorola Solution jobs get their bearings at Navigation House

In a fillip to the actual physical office sector, Motorola is to take over 25,000 sq ft at Navigation Square, just a few hundred metres from City Hall and downriver of One Albert Quay.

The Motorola move sees a return of the name and strong presence to Cork, after the communications company left the city in 2007 with the loss of 300 jobs, and the subsequent €22m sale of an office building Motorola had owned andoccupied at Cork’s suburban Mahon over a number of years.

Informed property sources say that Motorola Solutions will join NetApps at the c 95,000 sq ft office building, part of the overall 330,000 sq ft (net) Navigation Square development being delivered by O’Callaghan Properties (OCP).

A separate company NetAppspreviously took 28,500 sq ft at NSQ2 in summer 2022 for an initial 100 employees, aiming to scale up to 300 jobs at the OCP development, anchored by finance sector Clearstream’s 90,000 sq ft in the adjacent first completed building, after its move from Cork Airport Business Park.

Meanwhile, also at Navigation Square’s Block B/NS2, apart from the imminent Motorola arrival with 200
employees, it’s known that at least one other deal, with a significant state body to include daily public access, is also pending, being negotiated over several months by the OPW.

Requests to Motorola and OCP this week for confirmation of the techcompany’s deal at Navigation Square were met with a “no comment” from OCP. Previous requests for comment to OCP on the possibility of a State service occupier also locating at Navigation Square were not addressed.

Official confirmation from Motorola Solutions on their move is awaited. Earlier this summer, the company — which employs 20,000 globally — in a corporate statement headed from Chicago and Cork announced it would be establishing a research and development base for the security and safety sectors in Cork for 200 highly skilled employees.

Then it commented that “the new R&D centre, planned for Cork’s vibrant city centre, complements Motorola Solutions’ existing footprint in Ireland, which is focused on delivering the emergency services’ secure communications network, Ireland’s National Digital Radio Service”.

The opening in Cork City is supported by the IDA and the Government. In its July Motorola company statement, it said “the team in Cork will join a global force of talent focused on developing communications, video security, access control, artificial intelligence and
command centre technologies to help
address the growing scale of safety and security challenges”.

Recruitment began this summer for roles such as software engineers,
designers, developers, and product
managers, aiming to fill the 200 positions by 2026. “We’re looking to get up and running soon with a temporary facility, until the end of the year, and then we’re going to move to a more permanent facility in Cork city centre, hopefully during the next year,” said Fergus Mayne, Motorola country manager for Ireland and the UK.

The deal at NS2 comes as a summer
office market report said that at the end of June 2024 there was 79,600 sq m of available office accommodation in Cork, down from 85,600 sq m in the previous quarter, Q1, with half of all vacant stock in the city centre.

Letting agents at Navigation Square are Savills and CBRE. No details of the lease deal, terms, or occupier incentives being finalised at Navigation Square are as yet known, but current prime city centre headline rents stand at €325 psm (€30 psf), having dipped slightly from the start of 2023.