Eight years ago, when Facebook-owner Meta agreed a €561 million deal to lease the 14-acre Bankcentre campus in Ballsbridge, Dublin, for 25 years, it made some big promises that have not panned out.
After agreeing to let Fibonacci Square, which was the biggest single office letting in the State’s history at the time, Facebook Ireland’s then boss, Gareth Lambe, said it would move 2,200 staff from its Grand Canal Square building in Dublin’s south docks to the new development called Fibonacci Place.
The move provided a “lot of room for growth” and the company intended to fill the campus with 7,000 staff, he said.
Construction of Facebook’s Ballsbridge campus started in late 2018 and the 34,838sq m development was completed in late 2022. During those four years, circumstances changed.
RM Block
The social media firm’s Irish headcount did rise to about 3,000 during the pandemic, at which point it also announced a decision not to occupy Fibonacci Place. In the past four years, it has also cutback its headcount to 1,500 in Dublin.
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Meta now has little need for Fibonacci Place, except a small pocket of the old Bankcentre campus where its staff are based. It has been left carrying a €22.5 million annual rent bill for the Dublin 4 office on its balance sheet.
Tech firm Workday appears to have encountered a similar scenario, albeit not to the same extent as Meta.
Last year, the company signed a deal to lease 38,648sq m of office space in the newly built College Square in Dublin 2. The agreement struck by landlord and developer Marlet represented the largest single European office letting since 2021.
The deal was regarded as a major vote of confidence in Dublin’s office sector, but last month Workday put more than a fifth of this office space back on the market to sublease.
The trend of multinationals subleasing Dublin office space they no longer require truly took off in 2022.
Facebook, Intercom and LinkedIn, among others, flooded the so-called shadow office market with grey space. Unlike vacant office space, which is earning no rent roll for a landlord, grey space has a tenant in place, but is unoccupied and advertised as a sublet.
Data from property agency JLL Ireland said Dublin’s grey space rate was down 37.5 per cent from its peak at the start of 2024, but 130,000sq m of this vacant space was still sitting on the market.
Since putting Fibonacci Place on the market, Meta, which is paying €22.5 million a year for the campus, has sublet two floors representing about 8 per cent of the site for €2 million a year to National Bank of Canada and Griffin Aviation.
Intercom, which struck a €6.8 million a year deal in 2019 to lease the Cadenza building on Adelaide Road in Dublin 2, has sublet half the block.
Firms advertising grey space have faced stiff competition from the regular market, with the likes of landlord Kennedy Wilson and David Daly’s October Investments bringing new stock to the market and landlords of older buildings also carrying vacant stock.
October Investments completed the new office scheme 16 Stephen’s Green in 2022, but only last month struck a deal to let the building to flexible workspace provider Pembr. Meanwhile, the 17-storey Exo Building, completed in 2022, still has five floors vacant. An Post is the anchor tenant there, having relocated most of its administration from the GPO on O’Connell Street.
In the north docks, US-owned landlord Kennedy Wilson has signed MetroLink and Wells Fargo as tenants at its new Coopers Cross office development on Mayor Street, Dublin 1, for a combined 7,000sq m of space, but still has about 30,000sq m left to lease.
Kennedy Wilson will soon have nearby, and better-located, competition in the form of 4/5 Grand Canal Square, Meta’s former headquarters in the south docks. German owner Union Investment started a €70 million renovation last September, which is expected to take 18 months. However, 11 months in, there is no sign of a tenant at the other end for the 23,000sq m building.
On the opposite side of the river, Johnny Ronan’s Ronan Group appears to be hedging its bets regarding its plans to redevelop Citigroup’s office building.
In June, it secured permission to demolish partly the existing office block at 1 North Wall Quay and develop a four-block office scheme on the site, but now has lodged revised plans for the site with Dublin City Council that would replace 40 per cent of planned office space with two new hotels.
Slow letting activity in pockets of Dublin, more vacant space being advertised on the market and developers hedging their bets tell part of the office sector’s story, but agents feel they have a firm set of metrics to back up their bullish mood.
Letting activity
Last year, for the first year since the pandemic, leasing volumes rose above the 10-year average as take-up came to 241,500sq m, Savills said.
Further analysis of the market by the real estate agency said 120,700sq m of leasing activity occurred in the first half of 2026, with a further 104,900sq m of transactions expected to complete before the end of the year.
Agents are optimistic because letting activity is returning to normal levels, and, in turn, vacancy levels in the sector are falling. Even some long-vacant buildings, 2 Grand Parade (the former Irish Nationwide Building Society head office) near Ranelagh, have seen some floors leased.
In a market analysis report by JLL Ireland this week, the agency’s head of leasing advisory, Deirdre Costello, said the office sector’s vacancy rate had fallen from a peak of 16 per cent in 2024 to 12.2 per cent. She said that when reserved space was accounted for, the vacancy rate declined to 10.3 per cent.
The office agents feel the overall vacancy rate does not paint a fair picture of demand in the sector because many older buildings, which are not as desirable to tenants, make up a lot of the dormant office space.
Costello said falling vacancy rates for Grade A offices, which were predominantly recently built office blocks, demonstrated strong demand in the market. Grade A offices account for 52 per cent of the 579,700sq m of all vacant office space in Dublin, which is down 26 per cent since the peak in late 2024.
However, she said, when reserved space was taken out of the vacancy calculation, only 5.2 per cent of Grade A space was vacant.
These falling levels of vacancy have been caused by some big deals for grey space. LinkedIn sublet space it no longer required in Wilton Park, a near-40,000sq m campus along Dublin’s Grand Canal, to Stripe and EY Ireland.
Nearby at Park Place on Adelaide Road, in a new office development by commercial builder Clancourt, space has gradually been filled through large lettings to Apple and aircraft lessor Orix Aviation. In recent weeks, artificial intelligence firms OpenAI and Anthropic have also helped chip away at the vacancy rate through deals for the Tropical Fruit Warehouse and Styne House respectively.
Naturally, some of these deals will involve the new occupiers leaving some empty office space behind them when they move, but agents feel the activity shows a busy market.
Their follow-up point is that this flurry of activity has led to a looming shortage of so-called Grade A space, which is touted as the only type of office space in demand.
Based on data in JLL’s construction pipeline, there is 84,500sq m of office space under construction, of which three-fifths is pre-let.
Costello said this was the lowest level since the early 2010s, lower than any moment during the financial crisis and six-times lower than the peak level of 577,000sq m in 2019, the year before the pandemic.
If the real estate sector’s assessment is correct and a shortage of supply is looming then why aren’t developers responding?
Office pipeline
Sean Reilly, the founder and executive chairman of McGarrell Reilly, recently completed the construction of the office scheme Charlemont Square, which has been leased to tenants including Bloomberg, Amazon and Mark Anthony Brands.
Even with the pandemic-induced difficulty endured by the office sector in his recent memory, he would be interested in moving on to a new office project if he had a guaranteed tenant who agreed to pre-let the building before construction.
“I wouldn’t have any problem developing more office space in Dublin if I got the right site. You really need the right site, but I don’t have another site at the minute,” he said.
CBRE Ireland head of research Colin Richardson said there were developers with the “right sites” in central Dublin and who had planning permission and would start construction if they had a pre-let.
“Once they secure that pre-let, they will absolutely be built out,” Richardson says.
Developers and office landlords such as Clancourt, Kennedy Wilson, Ronan Group, Hibernia, Iput and Union Investment are all being told by agents that if they build then the tenants will come.
JLL has told clients it has tenants with requirements for 204,000sq m of office space in Dublin on its books, with a handful seeking individual lettings of 10,000sq m. It said 38 companies in total were looking for space between 900sq m and 1,800sq m and 54 wanted space of between 400sq m and 900sq m.
Richardson said legal firms and professional services firms were the main parties driving the letting market this year, and more demand from AI companies was expected.
“The legal firms are certainly leading the market at the moment. The Mason Hayes and Curran deal is obviously publicised for the former Anglo Irish Bank HQ on St Stephen’s Green, and then two of the big five law firms are out with requirements at the moment,” he said.
“They will be taking space on a pre-let basis and there are four or five sites that have an active planning permission with developers who are ready to go if they secure a pre-let.”
Patricia Ward, a director with TWM, a commercial property agency, said the State had also led a lot of activity in 2026 and in recent years.
The Land Development Agency vacated its office on Tara Street, which will be demolished to make way for a MetroLink station, and moved to nearby George’s Court on Townsend Street. In April, Enterprise Ireland committed to take 9,300sq m in the newly built 160 Townsend.
“The State is a sophisticated negotiator,” Ward said. “They’ve got a very big property team and I think that they’re doing a very good job. I think what the HSE have done by buying the office buildings in Elmpark Green office campus in Dublin 4 was a great move.
“Those buildings went on site in 2003, and they were completed in 2007 and the front block still has not been occupied 20 years later. It was sold by Nama and the new owners spent about €45 million converting it into an office building, and then HSE bought it and a whole lot of other sections of the campus for €50 million. It was a really good deal that the HSE did there.”
Ward said the activity of the HSE had also brought some vacant office blocks in the city back into use, including an old block called Custom House Plaza in the IFSC, which the HSE had purchased to use for the Mater hospital’s new ophthalmology unit.
Some of these IFSC-era buildings, the non-Grade A type that were developed more than 30 years ago in the 1990s, have been labelled “stranded assets”, which are defined as properties that do not meet energy efficiency standards desired by tenants. Ward said she was not a fan of the term.
“I don’t like to use the word stranded because it’s my job to make sure nothing is stranded and to find a home for everything, no matter how challenged it might be. We have sold buildings like that in the last 12 months, and they’re all being sold to owner-occupiers because they’re so cheap,” she said.
“Investors are not buying them, because of the capital they would need to put into them, and I can’t advise an existing landlord, ‘If you spend this amount, you will get a tenant’. That’s not necessarily going to fall into place.
“So now we’re seeing some businesses, who have rented for years, now have an opportunity to have their own building that they would never have probably aspired to before.”
