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New Belfast HQ for commercial property agency after £1m investment

Published on 5 December 2023

Lambert Smith Hampton says move to The Kelvin in city centre will ‘support our wider plans for the future’.

Commercial property agency Lambert Smith Hampton (LSH) has moved its Belfast headquarters to new offices in a £1m investment.

LSH’s team of 80 people are now based in a 7,000 sq ft grade A office space in The Kelvin building in Belfast city centre.

The firm, which is the biggest commercial property consultancy in Northern Ireland, was previously based at Clarence House in May Street.

The Kelvin is a five-storey recently-refurbished office space on College Square East. LSH said its £1m investment enabled it to provide open-plan offices with collaborative meeting spaces and multiple private meeting rooms.

Neil McShane, managing director of LSH in Ireland, said: “We have expertise across all property disciplines and this year we have seen our team continue to grow, with six new hires and several team members achieving promotions. As our business continues to grow and evolve, we felt it was time to move to a building that better supports the way our teams now work.

“Our move to The Kelvin has allowed us to design our office space to provide a collaborative, innovative, and inspiring space for our team as well as bring all of our staff onto one floor.

“We’re confident that the move to the new offices will support our wider plans for the future, enabling us to take advantage of new opportunities and provide a great platform for the team to continue to provide excellent service to our clients.”

The building is named after physicist Lord Kelvin, who was born at 17 College Square East.

According to Future Belfast, which tracks planning applications and building development in the city, the site was developed in the 1820s as a terrace of four residences.

It was later converted into a cinema, first as the Kelvin Picture Place in 1910, going through several iterations until it became The Classic in 1969. However, it closed two years later due to bomb damage.

A replacement five-storey office was completed in 1982 and became Stokes House and the headquarters of KPMG until 2017. J&E Properties later submitted planning applications for the redevelopment of the site, with design of The Kelvin completed by RMI Architects.

LSH’s latest investment transactions report, published in October, said investment deals in commercial property in the third quarter of 2023 reached £122.7m.

That was more than three times the figure for the previous quarter.

But investment volume in the office sector was subdued at £1.5m, 91% below the five-year quarterly average.

Source: Belfast Telegraph (link opens in new window)