Profits at Hugh Wallace architect firm rise to over €176,000
New accounts show the post-tax profits for the 12 months to the end of June last followed a figure of €166,678 in the prior year.
Douglas Wallace Consultants Ltd paid dividends of €57,412 last year. This followed a dividend payout of €30,000 in 2023.
'Business was very good last year. Very stable,' Mr Wallace said.
Hotel and leisure business returned, he said, after it was decimated during the Covid-19 pandemic with the main work in the sector now refurbishments.
Mr Wallace said the company is involved in house building in Dublin, Cork, Sligo and Dungarvan.
'We were not in the residential space four or five years ago,' he said.
The company is also the designer of Harcourt Developments' €200m redevelopment of the North Quays in Waterford city that recently secured planning permission from Waterford City Council.
The plans include 350 apartments across six blocks and a nine-storey 160-room hotel.
Mr Wallace said the company employs 24 people, with the majority of those architects and architect technicians.
Accumulated profits at Douglas Wallace Consultants Ltd at the end of June last totalled €702,147, while cash funds declined from €315,982 to €217,498.
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Mr Wallace said the hiring of 'super Marios' for the Government's Housing Activation Office was not the answer to addressing the current crisis.
Rather than having a Housing Activation Office, he said the Land Development Agency (LDA), when it was established, should have been granted powers to address the housing crisis 'and make it more robust and give it proper authority'.
Mr Wallace dismissed the Government's Housing Activation Office as 'just another quango'.
He said the largest bottlenecks today in the effort to build more housing are securing finance from lenders and the cost of construction.
'They are interlinked. Planning is a bottleneck as well, but not to the same extent as these two issues. The banks are not lending.'
Mr Wallace said he advises clients that planning for projects may take up to two years and 'they can't understand why this should be the case'.
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