Lee Treanor, HBD

HBD development director Lee Treanor gives us the lowdown on Island's impressive new features and sustainable design

Transcript

00:00Hi, Lee Trainor, Developer Director at HUB. We're outside Ireland today. Ireland's 100,000

00:15square feet of net zero carbon workspace in the heart of Manchester city centre. The ethos

00:21behind the building has been people, place and planet. Place, we're really centrally

00:25located in Manchester with all the amenities it has to offer. People, we've got a real

00:30focus on health and wellbeing, so we've got a lot of immediacy in the building. Communal

00:34spaces to try and build that authentic community. Planet, we focus really hard on sustainability,

00:39so we've got a building with less than half the normal amount of embodied carbon that

00:43we'd have in an office building, and a neighbours rating which is one of the highest in the

00:47country, so allows occupiers to really drive down their operational energy and productive

00:53high space in a sustainable way. So, we took the decision just over two and a half years

00:58ago to speculatively develop Ireland with our third venture partner, Greater Manchester

01:03Pension Fund. It was quite a bold decision at the time, but we really believed in Ireland

01:07in terms of its quality and its location, so we've delivered that speculatively. I

01:12think what we're finding now is with some of the challenges on viability in the market,

01:17what we're finding is there isn't as much spec-filled office space in Manchester as

01:20there has been in previous years. We think that will lead to quite fixed office space

01:25and the need for more developments to be brought forward, possibly on a pre-lap basis where

01:29historically they've been brought forward on a speculative basis.