Cork office development ‘has key role’ for Nama

Nama has a role to play in helping provide the high quality office developments that are required to attract large multinationals to Cork. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers Cork partner Ger O’Mahoney called on Nama to play its part in making suitable sites available for developments in the city to increase the supple of grade A office accommodation.

Mr O’Mahoney highlighted John Cleary’s development at 1, Albert Quay, which will house PwC and fire security specialists, Tyco, as the type of development the city needs to continue to attract substantial foreign direct investment in the coming years.

“I think we’ll have to have more developments like John Cleary’s one to make sure we can continue to attract the type of people like Tyco.

“I would think we’re coming close to a profitable solution for building new offices but the lead time could catch us and that’s something that everybody in the business community is focused on. Nama can help on that,” said Mr O’Mahoney.

He said development has moved from purely speculative to a situation where “people have to have absolute certainty on the outcome” but said that the right answer lay somewhere in between.

Small and medium-sized businesses are also somewhat reluctant to demand credit from banks as independently-owned firms remain cautious following the economic crash.

“In our CEO Conference survey 62% of people said they saw no change in their capital structure and only 11% saw new borrowing. There is a confidence level among the executives to go out there and get new funding which isn’t there yet.

“I think there’s an element of it being difficult to get finance and the length of time it takes to get it is sometimes a barrier. But allied to that is that there isn’t enough demand made of them, I would have thought, and that’s borne out by the Credit Review Office statistics as well,” he said.

In addition to sustaining demand on outbound routes from Cork Airport, ensuring Cork is an attractive destination is key to securing the airport’s future, said Mr O’Mahoney.

He warned however, that should demand for business routes begin to wane it could knock the city’s competitiveness and hamper connectivity.

“The business routes are utilised and have been sustained because there’s a demand on those. If they started to erode it would undermine our competitive position in terms of our connectivity and I think that’s something that all of us are very conscious of and most of us would bias our travel plans to go through Cork Airport to ensure that the airport is a viable, key piece of infrastructure for us.

“But I wouldn’t underestimate the challenges that are out there in the competitive landscape in aviation at the moment,” said Mr O’Mahoney.