Quoted Irish property group Dunloe Ewart is believed to be selling up in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
The company is trying to sell all its Northern Ireland and other UK assets, which include at least 14 properties.
Dunloe’s Belfast portfolio alone is estimated to be worth £85m.
Noel Smyth, Dunloe’s Dublin-based chairman, and Nigel Kinnaird, head of the companys Belfast office, were unavailable for comment.
But they are understood to have already been approached by Ulster property speculators Frank Boyd and Andrew Creighton.
Boyd’s firm, Killultagh Companies, owns the North Rugby ground, Ormeau Road and Conswater Shopping Centre in east Belfast, which it bought last year for £50m.
Industry sources said that Dunloe Ewart was offloading the properties because it wanted to go back into private ownership.
Private ownership would enable Dunloe to concentrate on joint ventures and key developments south of the border.
Last week, Smyth blamed a downturn in the Northern Irish market for pretax losses of ¬13.4m (£8.4m) for the year to 31 December 2001.
In 2000, the company reported a ¬9m (£5.57m) pretax profit.
Dunloe has also pulled out of some high-profile deals, including the ¬31.7m (£20m) purchase of the two-acre (0.8ha) Boland Mills site in Dublin’s docklands.
In Belfast, it also owns assets such as Nine Lanyon Place and the Howden Sirocco site, which formed the biggest part of the companys ¬22m (£13.73m) write-down last year.
Earlier this year, Dunloe scaled back plans for a ¬244m (£150m) retail development in Belfast’s Cathedral Way, in a bid to win over city planners.
EGi News 13/05/02
