Value of Liffey Valley land written down by almost 40%

Neil Callanan and Mark Hilliard

Kelly Brooke on a visit to the Liffey Valley Centre.

Britain's richest man, The Duke of Westminster recently sought planning permission for a €500m development next to Liffey Valley

• 1
• 2

Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster's property development company, has written down the value of its land next to Liffey Valley shopping centre in Dublin by nearly 40%.

Grosvenor valued its 50% joint venture stake in Barkhill, the company which owns the land, at £12.8m at the end of last year, down from £20.1m the previous year. The other 50% of Barkhill is owned by O'Callaghan Properties.

Planning permission was recently sought for a €500m development on the site which the promoters say will create 4,000 jobs by 2013. The proposal is to construct of 60 new shops, a supermarket, a library, civic centre and more than 2,1000 car parking spaces.

Grosvenor and Aviva Investors own the existing shopping centre, which opened in 1998. As revealed in the Sunday Tribune, they are looking to offload a 50% stake in the centre and there has been some interest from one Irish and one international party. Grosvenor does not separately list the value of the centre so the extent to which it wrote down its value is not known.

Grosvenor also wrote down the value of Liverpool One, the shopping centre in which the Ryan family of Ryanair fame are investors, this time by £165m. The Ryan family's investment, however, is not believed to be affected because Grosvenor agreed to cover cost overruns and take the development risk when the funding agreement was signed. The family was one of five private investors who put up £250m in equity for the project in November 2004.

Grosvenor is acknowledged to have underestimated the cost of constructing the scheme and potential rental returns, which meant that it has written down the value of Liverpool One four times. The centre opened last year.