In September, two of Dublin’s newest warehouse occupants invited UKWA’s CEO Clare Bottle to visit their sites, as part of her ‘Around the Warehouses in 80 Visits’ tour, focused on the variety of logistics operations across the UK and Ireland. Alongside its familiar British arm, UKWA is also responsible for another brand: the All Ireland Warehousing Association (AIWA).
Vacancy rates for logistics property in Dublin are very low, only about 2 percent, according to Stephen Mellon from CBRE, who gave an excellent presentation at UKWA’s recent Roadshow event hosted by Combilift in Monaghan. Property rental prices per sq ft are on a par with Manchester, UK, but set to grow by up to 6 percent, outstripping other EU cities like Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam. Warehouses in Dublin are hot property and Mellon suggests that investors from other countries are often surprised by the build quality and environmental credentials found here.
Specialising in Dublin, developer IPUT owns the largest office and logistics portfolio in the city, valued at over 2.7 billion EUR. In 2022, Maersk signed up for two of IPUT’s four new units on Quantum Logistics Park at Kilshane Cross in north Dublin, close to the airport. The smaller of the two is Unit 4, which is the first net zero carbon logistics building in Ireland and only the third wooden warehouse in Europe. The continent’s first two such warehouses were built in Austria, which is where the glulam framework for this one was prepared. More than 786 tonnes of carbon was saved in the construction of this building. The standard cladding means it looks like any other warehouse from the outside, but inside the difference is stark. It is hard to decarbonise shipping, but Maersk has already divested its investments in oil and introduced Laura Maersk, the world’s first green methanol-powered container ship. This warehouse is another step in the right direction.
Around the same time, Iron Mountain leased a 162,000 sq ft warehouse at another IPUT development, Aerodrome Business Park. The unit is divided into two chambers: one for storage of documents and records, which is Iron Mountain’s traditional market; the other chamber is dedicated to pallet storage, reflecting their move into warehousing. This property boasts exceptional sustainability standards too, with both LEED Gold and BREEAM Excellent. Developed during the 1990s by the US Green Building Council, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design or “LEED” accreditation is not widely used in the UK, but arguably it carries more weight than BREEAM in Ireland, being widely recognised by Americans. Last year the Irish Times reported that more than half the firms investing here are from the US, firms like Iron Mountain, whose global headquarters are in Boston, Massachusetts
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