Global banking giant Citigroup has signed for a new €300M headquarters in Dublin, in a timely boost for the city’s commercial real estate sector.

The U.S.-based lender has agreed a deal for a new office campus in Dublin’s north docklands with Johnny Ronan’s RGRE for the delivery of 300K SF of office space at the developer’s Waterfront South Central site.

Citi is understood to be paying about €100M to acquire the site, the Irish Times reported, with a further €200M being set aside for the construction of its new base.

The building is due for completion in 2026 and the bank’s proposed footprint will equate to around 70% of the 430K SF of office space RGRE intends to develop as part of the wider north docklands scheme.

The news comes at a time when Dublin is braced for the potential impact of a global contraction among the digital corporate giants, with redundancies announced worldwide at the likes of Meta and Salesforce.

Meta’s decision not to occupy four blocks developed for it by RGRE at its new Ballsbridge campus brought circa 375K SF of office space back to Dublin’s letting market, while last October LinkedIn decided to seek an alternative occupier for two blocks under development at its new European headquarters in Wilton Park, which added a further 265K SF to the city’s available office stock.

While Dublin’s burgeoning life sciences sector and legal and professional services companies have continued to seek space, whether they will compensate for any further space divestments by technology companies remains to be seen.

In its latest research, CBRE said that companies took up about 2.2M SF of office space in Dublin during 2022, up about 35% year-on-year.