HubSpot takes a 20-year lease of new building on Dublin’s South Docks

13 Nov 2018

1 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. Image: Gary Belcher

HubSpot secures additional space on the south side of Dublin city.

Tech giants continue their expansion to shiny offices in Dublin with the latest news that inbound marketing player HubSpot is to lease all of the office accommodation in 1 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay (1SJRQ) on Dublin’s South Docks for €6.8m a year from Hibernia REIT.

Overall, the expansion will allow HubSpot to accommodate up to 1,400 seats across its two locations.

‘This expansion will allow us to increase headcount, develop more world-class products and continue to deliver exceptional service to our customers’
– CHRISTIAN KINNEAR

Dublin has been home to HubSpot’s European headquarters since 2013. In April 2016, the company opened a new office at One Dockland Central before taking on additional space at Two Dockland Central in July 2018 to facilitate its growth in EMEA.

HubSpot, which is already a tenant of Hibernia in One and Two Dockland Central just over the river near the North Docks, where it will continue to occupy 73,000 sq ft, is taking a 20-year lease of 1SJRQ, with a 12-year term certain, commencing in June 2019.

The lease covers 112,000 sq ft and 31 parking spaces, on which HubSpot will pay – after a four-month rent-free period – an initial rent of €6.8m per annum, equating to €59.75 per sq ft for the office space. The date of HubSpot’s break options in One and Two Dockland Central has been extended by three-and-a-half years to align with 1SJRQ.

Inside Dublin’s tech boom

The news comes just a week after it emerged that Google, marking 15 years in Dublin, has reached an employment figure of 8,000, with 1,000 of those jobs filled in 2018 alone. Google plans to expand around Silicon Docks and, during the year, we reported that Google was undertaking the largest redevelopment in the city, at Bolands Quay.

Within days, social media giant Facebook, which employs 4,000 people in Ireland, revealed that it is expanding its investment by acquiring a long-term lease of 14 acres in Ballsbridge for a new campus development. The Bank Centre, a premises currently occupied by AIB, will be the site for the brand new campus for the company and can accommodate an additional 5,000 workers.

For HubSpot, further expansion is clearly on the cards. Two years ago, HubSpot announced plans to create 320 new jobs at its European headquarters at One Dockland Central, in a bid to bring total employment at the company in Dublin to about 500 people.

In September, Siliconrepublic.com reported that the company had surpassed the crucial 100-engineer milestone in Dublin. HubSpot EMEA managing director Christian Kinnear revealed that Service Hub, one of the three core pillars of HubSpot’s new Enterprise Growth Suite, was built entirely from the ground up in Dublin, which is also home to many of the company’s mobile product development activities.

HubSpot is a global inbound marketing and sales platform that is used by more than 48,000 businesses in more than 100 countries. HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan and CTO Dharmesh Shah founded HubSpot 12 years ago when they were both studying for MBAs at MIT.

Commenting on the new office space at South Docks, Kinnear said: “HubSpot has grown significantly in EMEA over the last few years, and our headquarters in Dublin has played a significant role in that progress.

“This expansion will allow us to increase headcount, develop more world-class products and continue to deliver exceptional service to our customers. We’re excited to move into this new space and we look forward to seeing what we can achieve from Dublin in the coming years.”

1SJRQ is currently reaching the final stages of construction. When finished in early 2019, it will comprise 112,000 sq ft of offices and 7,000 sq ft of food and beverage space. It is one of six adjacent properties owned by Hibernia that make up the Windmill Quarter in Dublin’s South Docks. These will total around 400,000 sq ft of office space along with further residential, food and beverage, and gym areas when 1SJRQ is finished in early 2019.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com