Business facility to be sold after 10 years empty: Council-owned Signal Centre in Bangor to go into private hands
A Co Down facility aimed at small and start-up businesses is to be sold after none used it for at least a decade.
The Signal Business Development Centre in Bangor is a council-owned site opened around 20 years ago, aimed at helping the area’s smaller firms grow and new companies get off the ground.
Offering corporate meeting spaces as well as having the local authority’s development advice team available on site, providing help on everything from marketing to research to putting together business plans, it was supposed to be a one-stop-shop for an area that can lack suitable accommodation for grassroots start-ups – and was plugged as “the next generation of conference, exhibition and training facilities”.
But it’s now to be sold into private hands as it turns out no outside firms have been in it since at least 2015, with its office space only being used by the local council.
Bangor has a demographic problem when it comes to business, in that a substantial amount of its residents are commuters who work in Belfast. The result is large numbers of people who create money, jobs and productivity leave the Co Down city every morning, and return to suburban homes there every night.
Signal was supposed to be the crucible that would light some of that entrepreneurial flame in Bangor itself – but for the past 10 years, it’s been more of a damp squib.
Located on Innotec Drive on the edge of an industrial park in the south of the city, Signal was supposed to take people with good ideas and help them get a toehold in the corporate world, solidifying a good base for their companies before they’d move off into larger commercial properties.
As Ards and North Down Council’s chief executive Susie McCullough told the News Letter, however, that hasn’t been the case for a long while.
Over the past 10 years, she said, it’s hosted two or three other council teams in addition to the local authority’s business development people already headquartered there, but nothing in the way of outside firms.
Recently private companies have expressed an interest in buying the property off the council, she added, something that’s now likely to happen as the local authority looks to bring all of its office staff together in a single block in Bangor city centre.
Offering nine meeting rooms with a total space of more than 4,100 square feet, when it was relatively new the facility was available to be hired for corporate seminars, product launches, and unveiling or council and government strategies.
Over the last 10 years even that use of it died away, however; on the occasions its larger spaces have been rented by an outside body, it has been for the likes of Police and Community Safety Partnership meetings.
It has also been used to train newly elected councillors on their duties and legal responsibilities.
The move to bring Ards and North Down Council staff together on the same site will also see the local authority dispose of office buildings in Newtownards, reportedly likely to be sold to the NHS, as well as grade A listed Victorian landmark Bangor Castle, which the council thinks should become a privately-run boutique hotel and wedding venue.