Union Investment Enters Irish Hotel Market With Acquisition of Premier Inn Dublin Docklands

Main Photo: The Premier Inn Dublin – imagined

Date: June 2021

Location: Castleforbes, Northern Docklands, Dublin, Ireland

Name: Premier Inn Dublin Docklands – opening Autumn 2023

No. of Keys: 262

Seller: The vendor and developer of the hotel project is Glenveagh Properties, best known as a house-builder.

Buyer: The Hamburg-based real estate investment manager, Union Investment, has acquired the planned Premier Inn hotel in Dublin’s Docklands. 

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 sqm (106,950 sqf) 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 fall 2023. The hotel is already leased to Premier Inn on a 25-year lease. The creditworthy tenant is part of Whitbread PLC, the United Kingdom’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 project site is in the Castleforbes sub-market in the northern Docklands. It benefits from excellent public transport links and is within easy reach of important demand generators in the city. In recent years, this former port and industrial area has been transformed into one of Dublin’s prime office locations and is regarded as the city’s financial and technology hub. The Convention Centre Dublin is approximately 10 minutes’ walk from the property.

THPT Comment: Great to see Union Investment enter the Irish market, which reaffirms Dublin’s strength as a hotel market.

First Seen: Institutional Real Estate

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