One thing that property people really like is a big, glossy brochure. A new block of flats isn’t really authentic without one. They usually involve pictures of besuited men leaping off buses and laughing babes in spaghetti straps. Headlines typically include words such as icon, investment and quarter (as in cultural, heritage, financial and so on). The more off-plan the development, the more on-message the brochure. Leeds, Manchester, Hull: they have all had their brochure moments. But I have never experienced a city with so many brochures as Belfast. I went there last week and came back with a small rainforest’s worth.
Having seen off the paramilitaries who made the city centre a no-go zone for almost four decades, Belfast is now in full property fervour; a spectacular array of icons, towers and quarters jostle for attention.
Driving in from the airport, Brendan Mullan of Investment Belfast announces we will start at the Titanic Quarter on the east bank of the Lagan, the river that bisects the city. Isn’t the name a hostage to fortune? “Are you joking? Titanic is an icon here,” he says. See what I mean? The doomed liner was built here, in a gargantuan dry dock still in place at what was the old Harland and Wolff shipyard. Two yellow H&W cranes still hover over the city like a pair of huge pi symbols. The shipbuilders are long gone, though, leaving 185 acres of brownfield site, with a mile of undeveloped water frontage. This will be Titanic Quarter. Sitting in a prefab office in the middle of the site is chief executive Mike Smith.
“We are going to start building in June this year,” he says. “Four hundred and seventy-five apartments on the Abercorn Basin. We already have 650 names on the waiting list.” Prices are about £135,000 for a one- bed, £175,000 for a two- bedder and £400,000 for a penthouse. When finished, Titanic Quarter hopes to include offices, shops, a maritime museum and, beside the old slipway, a building that will tell the Titanic story. Investment in the quarter is projected at £1 billion.
In the city centre on the west bank, the Obel Tower is under construction. At 26 storeys, Obel (its name is a take on Old Belfast) is going to be Northern Ireland’s tallest building. It is so funky, it doesn’t have a brochure but a hardback book, subtitled We Encourage People to Live with Their Heads in the Clouds. Its 190 units all sold in a weekend.
Much of the buzz is because Belfast is perceived to have turned a corner. During the Troubles, residential building didn’t happen in the city centre. Add the vogue for inner-city living to Belfast’s newly peaceful state, and the Celtic tiger roaring away in Dublin, and you have the basis for serious capital uplift.
Property investor Bernard O’Hare estimates his portfolio of 100 flats and houses, mostly in Belfast, is worth £15m.
“A four-bed terrace on the Ormeau Road, which was worth £20,000 before 1990, is now worth £170,000,” he says. “Similarly, property on the Lisburn Road for sale 10 years ago at £40,000 is going for £250,000.”
O’Hare has bought three flats in Obel, at £170,000 each. They will probably rent for about £600 a month, but is he confident there will be enough tenants at this level to fill all of the flats? “Belfast is benefiting from a spillover from the Celtic tiger,” he says. “The republic is now the third-richest economy in the world, per capita. If you couple that with the peace dividend, you have a unique growth factor. Terraces in the centre of Belfast used to sell for about £1,000 (in the mid-1980s). Next to those houses now stands the Hilton, where you can spend the same sort of money on a room for a couple of nights.”
I meet Kyle Alexander and Susie Orr of Laganside Corporation. Founded in 1989 to develop the city’s riverside, Laganside is folding in March 2007 as it feels its job is done. It has secured more than £870m in investment and created nearly 13,000 jobs in the area. For every £1 of government money, it says it has attracted £5 of private investment.
Alexander hands me a dozen brochures, all showing Belfast under blue skies. Orr takes me on a terrifying spin in a blow-up raft down the Lagan. As we shoot under a variety of very low bridges, she explains how the river has been revolutionised.
“It’s all about the weir!” she yells. “We put in the Lagan Weir in 1994! Before then, the river was very TIDAL! It would go out leaving VERY SMELLY MUDFLATS! AND RUBBISH!” Now the weir holds back the water, so the tide never goes out, and metal and glass new-builds are shooting up on either bank: Obel, the 200-bed Hilton, the Odyssey entertainment complex and the Waterfront Hall. House of Fraser is building a new store, and wasn’t paid by the city to do so. There are half a dozen new sites: Lanyon Place, Clarendon Dock, Mays Meadow and a cluster of quays. Occupants include Zurich Insurance, BT and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Back on dry land, I meet Thomas O’Doherty of Eric Cairns, an estate agency that seems to have jumped into bed with every new-build in the city. O’Doherty is so excited about Belfast he can hardly stop for breath. He rattles through the spiel: five new developments next year; yields averaging 6%; 16,000 new units planned for the next four years; investors pouring in from the republic, England, Australia; a 50/50 split between owner-occupier and buy-to-let investor.
O’Doherty rushes me to a sexy waterfront flat for sale (offers around £500K) and only stops talking when three rottweilers bound up at him against a wire gate. “Dogs. Every estate agent hates them,” he says with feeling.
Even the online lot are getting warm about Belfast.
A new website, www.LandlordStuff.co.uk, which says it is a “one-stop site”, with information, contacts and expertise for landlords, is devoted to Northern Ireland.
So how does Mullan, my man from Investment Belfast, sum up the present boom? “People are more confident,” he says. “They are young: 46% of the city is under 30. Unemployment is only 4%. Once, as soon as 5pm came round, everybody moved out of the city centre. That’s all changed.”
He won’t go as far as to say there is no sectarian divide left — his children go to a Catholic school, and he says most schools are segregated — but implies that what lines exist are far from the shiny new city centre.
The Europa Hotel, where Bill Clinton once stayed, boasts in a travel guide that it is the “most bombed hotel in Europe”, which I guess is a fairly original USP. Either way, it takes some confidence.
