Ronan Group Looks To UK Again As Irish Developer Targets London Living
For the second time in just a few months, one of Ireland’s best-known real estate developers has flagged its potential return to the London market over a decade after leaving.
Ronan Group Real Estate said that alongside its Irish development pipeline, it is also exploring a return to London. The company is fresh off the sale of the 360-unit Spencer Place residential development in Dublin’s north Docklands to Ardstone for €177M, making it the largest residential investment in Ireland this year.
Best known in the UK for its thwarted Battersea Power Station project, Ronan Group said in a statement earlier this month that it is “actively pursuing opportunities” as it charts a path back into the UK market, with the initial focus on opportunities in the living sector, which its Libra Living brand would operate.
RGRE Chairman Johnny Ronan first announced his interest in returning to the London market late last year after his company marked what it dubbed a “liberation moment” following the settlement of a protracted court battle with U.S. investment firm and former backer Fortress.
“We’re keen to look abroad again. There is a desire to go back into London,” RGRE Chief Executive Rory Williams said after the Fortress dispute was settled, allowing the company to concentrate on major Dublin projects such as the Glass Bottle development near Sandymount and Citigroup’s new €300M headquarters at the Waterfront site on North Wall Quay.
London is a market familiar to Johnny Ronan from the pre-Global Financial Crisis days of Treasury Holdings with his business partner of the time, Richard Barrett. In November 2006, through their company Real Estate Opportunities — a joint venture under Treasury Holdings — they acquired Battersea Power Station and its surrounding land for around £400M.
The partners put forward a £9B plan for a massive sustainable mixed-use redevelopment spanning 8.5M SF in south-west London, including a swathe of residential units, office space, retail outlets and a transport upgrade with a Northern Line extension, to a master plan by architect Rafael Viñoly.
But by late 2011, their plans had hit the buffers as lenders Lloyds Banking Group and the National Asset Management Agency moved to appoint administrators, signalling that REO could no longer service its debt, which by then stood at £502M.
In the aftermath, Ronan expressed shock over the way events played out and suggested that NAMA’s decision was shortsighted, while Treasury Holdings went into liquidation in 2012.
But that was then, and with a sense of unfinished business, RGRE is looking to return. While Williams did not rule out looking beyond London and has lamented the lack of large-scale opportunities like the Battersea site in the capital, he described the city as the “obvious” location to reenter the UK.
The fresh impetus comes following the RGRE and Fortress settlement in November last year, which finally ended a difficult relationship after Fortress had assumed circa €1B of Colony Capital loans to RGRE following Colony’s merger with DigitalBridge in 2021.
A year later, RGRE swapped its stake in the Fibonacci Square complex in Ballsbridge, Dublin, with Fortress for its interest in the Waterfront site in the city. Meta later cancelled its plans to occupy the Fibonacci complex as the U.S. social media giant scaled down its expansion plans in Dublin.
Since then, RGRE has delivered and has been working on a number of landmark commercial real estate and residential projects, including the 6M SF Glass Bottle quarter in Dublin 4, which will welcome its first residents this autumn.
It is that scheme that advisers told Bisnow could well provide the template for any move into the UK by RGRE, given that it is a large-scale regeneration project on a mature, urban site.
Living has been a buoyant real estate sector in the UK, and single-family housing accounted for 60% of build-to-rent investment in Q2, according to JLL, with over £800M invested over the first six months of the year, including more than £575M in Q2 alone.
By contrast, multifamily investment slowed in Q2 following robust activity in Q1 and Q4 2024, with H1 2025 investment reaching nearly £1.4B.
Overall BTR investment in the first half of 2025 fell 11% on the five-year January to June average and was 22% lower than H1 last year.
"Investment in the UK build-to-rent sector hit £2.2B in the first half of 2025. The pendulum, which had swung firmly towards multifamily investment in Q1, shifted to single family in the second quarter,” JLL Head Of UK Living and Residential Research Marcus Dixon said in a statement.
