PLANNING permission has been granted for a major new €30m, five-storey office block on South Mall that will accommodate 450 workers.
The company has now been given the go ahead for another city centre development to be located at the eastern end of the South Mall.
The 0.34-acre central site on 85-86 South Mall will bring 50,000 square feet of office space to the market in 2018.
The five-storey office building will extend to include two additional sites to the North which will border Crane Lane, Phoenix Street and Smith Street with the main entrance lobby onto the South Mall.
When they lodged plans JCD said they would begin construction work immediately if viable planning permission was granted and work towards a completion date of late Summer 2018.
High-quality office space in the city centre is viewed as critical to helping Cork attract new employers particularly in the context of technology companies and possible Brexit relocations.
International occupiers in the adjacent 89/90 South Mall building include high growth US technology companies Cylance and Eventbrite.
Historically, this type of occupier has tended to gravitate towards larger cities like Dublin, London and Amsterdam when looking to establish an initial footprint in Europe however It is understood that the South Mall and Corks City Centre has proved to be extremely popular with these early stage tech companies and that the new building will be attractive as a location for this type of foreign direct investment.
In addition to the 450 city centre jobs that will be accommodated once the project is complete, the project would also sustain 125 construction jobs throughout the building program.
Evening Echo, Alan Healy 07.08.2017