Dublin’s office lettings market is 78% more valuable than the Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh markets combined, according to a new Knight Frank study.

The agency said that while Dublin's economic importance is often compared to that of a U.K. regional city, its figures show that office lettings in the capital amounted to €148.6M in 2017, compared with a pooled value of €83.5M for Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh.

Lettings values were calculated by multiplying the year’s take-up in each city by two-thirds of the respective headline rent.

With this in mind, Knight Frank has analysed where Dublin sits in a more international context by comparing it with 20 cities across Europe.

The city comes in as the ninth most valuable office market in Europe, behind Moscow (€158.4M) and Warsaw (€150.9M), but ahead of Madrid (€138.8M), Milan (€116.8M) and Amsterdam (€99M). London sits at the top of the pile with a value of €1.1B, with Paris, Stockholm, Munich and Berlin rounding out the top five.

Despite record take-up of 3.6M SF last year, Dublin came 14th of the 21 cities in terms of office space let and was well behind Paris (20.3M SF) and London (13.8M SF). Dublin was again ahead of Manchester (1.2M SF), Birmingham (1M SF) and Edinburgh (800K SF) combined, and fairly on par with cities like Amsterdam (4M SF), Brussels (3.8M SF) and Milan (3.6M SF).

The city’s prime headline rent of €62.50/SF was the fourth highest of the 21 cities analysed, with only London (€120.77/SF), Paris (€75.25/SF) and Stockholm (€67.66/SF) coming in higher. The cheapest of the cities surveyed were Budapest (€24.53/SF), Prague (€22.85/SF) and Bucharest (€20.07/SF).

Knight Frank noted that Dublin’s prime headline rent was 44% higher than Manchester’s (€43.48/SF) and 54% more than both Birmingham and Edinburgh (€40.46/SF).