Bargain shops complex

An entire shopping centre investment, with 16 vacant shop units, 450-space multi-storey car park, and six office units is for sale in market town Charleville via Savills — for €950,000.

The fully-built scheme in the town centre may have cost €20m to €30 m to develop, and was developed on a 3.5 acre site bought in 2006 for around €4m.

Although it has largely remained vacant, it has Dunnes Stores — who own their own 62,000 sq ft unit — as its anchor and footfall driver. Elverys Sports also owns its own unit, while a c 2,500 sq ft unit is let to Unicarepharmacy, where terms had been agreed with Unicare at €180,000 pa, but local sources say the pharmacy is paying a rent of about half that sum.

Charleville Town Centre, with access points on Main Street and Bakers Lane, was funded by IBRC and comes to the market for receivers Kavanagh Fennell, via agents Peter O’Meara and Siobhan Young of Savills, who are selling by private treaty. Offers over €950,000 are being sought, said Mr O’Meara who added there was a real opportunity for a skilled and experienced new owner to market it, tenant it and build a business base and rent roll.

It may have an appeal to Irish shopping centre owners who have good tenant links and relationships, some of which they could transfer to Charleville. Dunnes Stores may have an interest given their central presence. Entrepreneurial types may install a discount trader like Dealz across several existing units and then strike attractive rent deals with smaller traders and services. SuperValu, Aldi, Supermacs and Subway are among strong local traders.

The centre was developed on a cleared, zoned site acquired by Barry Boland of BWP Ltd who also developed Shannon Town Centre, and was largely finished in 2008 to a good standard, but was slow to occupy as strong rents had been sought. Units available range from c 1,000 to 3,500 sq ft.

Charleville Town Centre has a central open-air pedestrian street, four levels of car parking with lift and travelator access to the retail floor, and has scope for a bar/restauant onto Bakers Lane (effectively a bypass of Main Street), plus seven offices. Excluding Dunnes, there’s 45,000 sq ft of developed space on offer.

One unit of its 17 is let and Elverys (like Dunnes) owns its own large space by the Main Street entrance.

Charleville has a population of 3,700, is on the Cork-Dublin rail line and serves a wide catchment as the second largest town (after Mallow) between Limerick and Cork cities.

Details: Savills, 021-4271371