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€300M Investment into Waterford City
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Harry Palmr wrote: »What does it say can someone do a photo or screengrab for the impecunious
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/quay-to-the-future-waterfords-waterfront-transformation-bqv99x0hr0 -
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Harry Palmr wrote: »What does it say can someone do a photo or screengrab for the impecunious
.This time last year, Fawaz Abdulaziz Alhokair was one of hundreds of Saudi Arabian businessmen reportedly detained in the rather gilded surroundings of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh. The mass detention, which included Prince Alaweed bin Talal, the largest shareholder in Citigroup, and other members of the royal family and business elite, was said to be part of a sweep of the business elite by the kingdom’s authorities.
Most of the detainees were released in January, with Alhokair soon back hosting dinners for important clients. “It’s as if he was on a business trip or a summer holiday or a religious trip,” an attendee of an Alhokair event told Reuters. “He is fully motivated, full of ambitions.”
One of those ambitions, unlikely as it seems, is the regeneration of Waterford city. Last Friday a subsidiary of the Fawaz Alhokair Group signed an agreement to redevelop the city’s North Quays, a brownfield site that used to house the R&H Hall flour mills and grain silos.
The subsidiary, Falcon Real Estate Development Ireland, is planning “a mixed-use lifestyle and recreational destination” consisting of a large shopping mall, cinema, 180-bed four-star hotel and conference centre, offices, a 300-unit residential complex, river boardwalk and visitor centre.
The Saudi group is said to be preparing to commit €300m to the urban regeneration project.
The agreement was heartily welcomed by local politicians, as a boost not just for the city but the entire southeast. It is one of only two so-called strategic development zones outside of Dublin. With SDZ status, any planning permission secured through the local authorities cannot be appealed to An Bord Pleanala.
The SDZ itself was approved without consideration by An Bord Pleanala last May, after the only two objections to the project were withdrawn.
The North Quays redevelopment has been embraced by the region’s local authorities, led by Waterford city council chief executive Michael Walsh, who played hurling for Waterford in two Munster finals in the 1980s and was a driving force behind the Waterford Greenway, a popular cycle trail. Lands have been purchased for infrastructure improvements, including the relocation of the city’s train and bus stations to a new transport interchange, and the construction of a bridge to link the North Quays to the city’s medieval heart.
Falcon Real Estate Development Ireland also has an agreement with Waterford city council and Nama to buy land in the same historic quarter for a second 10,000 sq m shopping centre.
The next step is an application for aid of €104m from the government’s Urban Regeneration and Development Fund to finance the infrastructure improvements.
Falcon Real Estate Development Ireland director Rob Cass is confident of a favourable response. “It ticks all the boxes,” he said. These include being an “innovative and transformational urban regeneration project” that will “leverage significant further public and private sector investment” and be “a catalyst for development that would not otherwise occur”.
Fawaz Alhokair
Fawaz Alhokair
Salman Alhokair
Salman Alhokair
The application will challenge the government’s commitment to promote prosperity for the regions. On his Ireland 2040 roadshow last March, the taoiseach Leo Varadkar tweeted that a “strong Waterford city will lead the development of the wider southeast”. He added that the North Quays strategic development zone was “a priority”. Under the Ireland 2040 plan, the population of Waterford is set to grow by 35,000 or 50%.
Fine Gael senator Paudie Coffey said the development would help counter Dublin’s “economic vortex”, which sucks in jobs, investment and people.
When the detailed planning proposal is made early next year, according to Cass, it will be a regeneration worthy of 2030, not 2020, with strong sustainability credentials. An editorial in The Munster Express, the city’s biggest-selling newspaper, summed up the collective enthusiasm, concluding that it was Waterford’s “time to shine”.
While improving, economically, the region is a laggard. According to the southeast economic monitor, compiled by Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT), the unemployment rate (7.2%) is well above the national average (5.7%). It is one of only two of the country’s eight regions not to have reached a government Action Plan for Jobs target of bringing unemployment within one percentage point of the national average.
It has the second-highest proportion of workers on the national minimum wage. Average household disposable income, at €34,700, has not passed its pre-crisis levels and substantially lags the median nominal income in Dublin (€46,000). Consumption, as measured by VAT returns, is just 40% of the national average, while new car registrations also trail much of the rest of the country.
The monitor concludes that the recent drop in unemployment “masks further deterioration of the [southeast’s] labour market” and the region “is being left behind relative to most of the other seven regions of Ireland”.
The WIT academics see an improvement in educational infrastructure as the best way to bridge the gap, yet Cass said that the North Quays regeneration project would also play its part, as a magnet for foreign direct investment and a centre for local enterprise.
Abdul Majeed Abdulaziz Alhokair
Abdul Majeed Abdulaziz Alhokair
Falcon are portrayed as “long-term, visionary” investors. Billionaire brothers Fawaz, Salman and Abdul Majeed Abdulaziz Alhokair started their retail fashion empire with two menswear shops in Riyadh in 1990. Over the following decade, they started taking on the franchises of some of the world’s biggest fashion brands including Gap, Banana Republic and the various Inditex makes. In 2002, they started to build shopping centres to house the retail brands.
Arabian Centres is now the largest mall operator in Saudi Arabia, with 19 outlets. The group has used its franchise experience to drive brands into the Caucasus and Balkans, representing top fashion names in Azerbaijan and Georgia, Serbia and Montenegro.
It has branched into hotels in Saudi Arabia, offering a similar franchise route for international brands before establishing its own chain. Now one of Saudi Arabia’s richest men, Fawaz Alhokair purchased a penthouse apartment at 432 Park Avenue in New York for $87.7m (€77.3bn) in 2016, then America’s tallest and priciest apartment.
The focus of the group over the past decade has been to lessen its exposure to the Saudi consumer. It has bought Aldo footwear shops in Spain, and set up a clothing venture with the fashion retail guru George Davies, a former Next chief executive.
It is planning two shopping malls in Milan, where Alhokair has also been repeatedly touted as a buyer of the troubled AC Milan football club, once owned by the businessman and politician Silvio Berlusconi. It also has interests in housebuilding and solar energy.
Its Irish interest is down primarily to Cass. A former consultant with KPMG Boxwood, he worked for Fawaz Alhokair in Riyadh in investor relations and strategy. He returned to live in Dungarvan, Co Waterford, in 2016, and was introduced to architect Niall Harrington of Fewer Harrington. The firm has been working on a plan for Waterford’s North Quays for some time.
Cass brought the idea to Fawaz. “It is pretty rare to get the chance to develop one kilometre of waterfront in a European regional city,” he said.
He said that the development would be subject to financing, and he expected the company to secure debt funding from Irish or international banks or possibly pension funds. He added that the city council might take 50% of the space on the office block for an innovation start-up hub.
Falcon itself will not be short of funds. A plan, touted for the past three years, has been to raise up to $2bn through the flotation of 30% of Arabian Centres to help drive international expansion. Senior group executives are expected in Waterford for an official launch this month, when the scale of their investment may become more apparent.
The retail element of the plan is obviously critical. Less than a mile from North Quays, the Ferrybank shopping centre was built just over a decade ago at a cost of €95m. It has never opened and is currently in the hands of Nama.
North Quays plans to be a destination mall for the southeast, a region short on a shopping centre of scale.
If the Alhokair group can bring Marks & Spencer to Kazakhstan, it is argued, then it surely could find enough tenants for a shopping centre, or two, in Waterford.
Waterford draws the wizard of Oz
Fawaz Alhokair Group is not the only overseas-based investor looking at developing in Waterford city. Originally from Mooncoin in south Co Kilkenny but now based in Australia, Seamus Walsh has been an active purchaser of land in the city over the past five years, first buying Waterford Castle, a hotel and golf resort originally developed by local businessman Eddie Kearns and the Smurfit group.
Last year Walsh moved to buy the Ard Ri site, formerly a Jurys hotel, overlooking the North Quays on the less-than-encouraging-sounding Mount Misery. He paid €1.5m for the 20-acre site, which has panoramic views across the city and its hinterland.
Walsh proposes to reconstitute the derelict hotel as a five-star property with spa, and to develop the additional lands as a tourist resort, in conjunction with the adjacent Waterford Golf Club. He has also bought a further 18 acres of lands on the south side of the river at Bilberry, the former home of Waterford Stanley, a range cooker manufacturer. The Stanley factory closed last year. According to local reports, Walsh plans to develop apartments and leisure amenities on the site once the North Quays development is completed.
Walsh left Mooncoin as a 19-year-old and has residential development interests in Australia.0 -
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I very much doubt that any commercial body will not have sussed out the tenancies etc etc that are being raised here.
There would be no investment if such basic things were not already planned for.
Quite obviously Al Hokair see the commercial benefit to them, of this development.
I have no doubt, despite what might be posted in this thread, that Al Hokair have done their due diligence on their investment and found it positive, provided the required infrastructure is put in place.
Anyone claiming otherwise should really provide some details of where they have fallen down in doing so.
The biggest worry, IMO, is whether or not the gov will provide sufficient financial support for that infrastructure to be put in place in a timely manner.
Without it the project gets abandoned.
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