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US property investment and services firm Kennedy Wilson has acquired Brooklawn House, a Dublin office property, for EUR 15 mln together with its partners. Kennedy Wilson’s stake equals 50%, and the property is being acquired with no debt financing, the company said in a press release.

According to a report in the Irish Times, the office was sold at the peak of the property bubble in April 2006 for EUR 47 mln. The price that Kennedy Wilson paid marks a 68% discount on that value, or a yield of 14%. At the time, D2 Property Management bought the property from developers G & T Crampton for a yield of just 3%.

'We are very pleased to have closed our first office acquisition in the Dublin market,' said Peter Collins, managing director of Kennedy Wilson Europe. 'We believe that a combination of improving demand, driven mainly by international tenants, and the lack of any significant development pipeline in the city, will lead to a strong level of rental growth over the next several years.'

Brooklawn House is a 4,000 m² office building located in the Ballsbridge submarket of Dublin. The building is 100% leased to three corporate and government tenants. The net operating income from the property over the past 12 months totalled EUR 2.2 mln. The Ballsbridge submarket is less than two miles from Dublin’s Central Business District and historically has been one of the best performing suburban office markets in the city.

The sale is believed to have attracted interest from about 25 Irish and overseas individuals and groups.

Kennedy Wilson, together with its institutional partners, has acquired $6.5 bn of real estate and real estate related debt since the beginning of 2010, including deals under contract. In Ireland, Kennedy Wilson, along with institutional partners, recently acquired the Alliance Building, a 210-unit apartment building in which the company invested $16 mln. Earlier this week it closed the acquisition of an Irish property loan portfolio together with its partner, the European Commercial Real Estate Group of Deutsche Bank AG for $7 mln.

The properties are predominantly commercial real estate assets across a mixture of asset classes, with the majority located in Dublin. Consensual workouts are in progress in respect of a majority of the assets.

in early July Kennedy Wilson announced it was teaming up with an unnamed global financial institution to create a EUR 2 bn platform which will invest in performing, sub-performing and non-performing loans secured by commercial and residential real estate in Europe in the UK and Ireland. Earlier this year, the US company launched a EUR 280 mln joint venture with Fairfax Financial to invest in UK and Irish commercial real estate and debt and led a consortium of institutional partners that acquired a loan portfolio from Bank of Ireland for $1.8 bn (EUR 1.3 bn).