German real estate investor, the KanAm Group, has made its first investment in the Irish market with the purchase of the Wythe Building on Cuffe Street in Dublin city centre.

A KanAm subsidiary, Leading Cities Invest, is understood to have paid over €20 million to buy the property from developer Avam Limited in an off-market transaction.

The sale of the building was handled jointly by CBRE and Savills on behalf of the vendor, while GVA Donal O’Buachalla acted for the purchaser. The parties declined to comment when asked by The Irish Times to confirm the sales price.

Located halfway between St Stephen’s Green and the former Dublin Institute of Technology campus on Kevin Street, the Wythe building is a six-storey property extending to 1,617sq m (17,405sq ft) of grade A office space. Completed in May this year, the building has been constructed to a gold LEED standard, with the final certification expected in the coming weeks.

The Wythe is fully-leased to four tenants. 52 per cent of the property is occupied by Young Advertising Limited, a subsidiary of Havas Ireland Limited, which was established in 1983 and provides a broad range of communication services.

The other tenants are Priceline Booking (Ireland), a 100 per cent subsidiary of Booking Holdings, which is headquartered in Connecticut, United States; Fidelis Insurance Ireland Designated Activity Company, established in December 2017 as a regulated insurer; and Hitachi Vantara (Ireland) Limited, a subsidiary of the global provider of data storage systems based in California.

While Leading Cities Invest’s acquisition of the Wythe represents its first investment in Dublin, the company is well-established with a portfolio of 29 properties distributed across 20 locations in eight countries: Germany, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Poland, Spain and now Ireland.

Outside of its investment in office properties, Leading Cities’ portfolio also incudes industrial and logistics units, retail, restaurants, hotels, doctors’ surgeries and medical services and leisure facilities. All properties within the portfolio are 100 per cent leased.

Leading Cities’ parent company, the KanAm Grund Group, meanwhile has a strong track record, handling transactions with a total value of $33 billion (€29.9 billion) since its establishment in October 2000.

Owner-managed, the KanAm Grund Group provides real estate investment and asset management services to German private investors, institutional investors and international investors through a number of specialist investment vehicles.

Source: Irish Times