Hamburg-based real estate investment manager Union Investment has entered the Irish hotel market by acquiring the planned Premier Inn hotel in Dublin’s Docklands. The purchase price was not disclosed.
Union Investment has been active in the Irish office property market since 2015. The company also recently entered the Irish housing market by acquiring the 8th Lock residential project in Dublin.
The hotel will offer 9,936 sq m of rental space and a total of 262 rooms spread over nine floors. Construction is expected to begin in July of this year. Completion is scheduled for autumn 2023. The project site is located in the Castleforbes submarket in the northern Docklands.
The hotel is already let to Premier Inn on a 25-year lease. The creditworthy tenant is part of Whitbread PLC, the UK’s largest hospitality group, and is the market leader in the premium budget hotel segment.
“We are expecting demand for hotels to recover by 2023 – the year of completion – at the latest and we intend to further expand our high-quality portfolio through targeted acquisitions. It currently comprises around 80 hotels. We will focus primarily on core products with resilient concepts and operators. The planned Premier Inn hotel is a core property in one of Europe’s best performing hotel markets, ” said Andreas Löcher, head of Investment Management Hospitality at Union Investment.
The vendor and developer of the hotel project is Glenveagh Properties.
