There are a lot of ways to invest £8-£9m nowadays. Indeed, probably the safest bet for the fortunate few with that amount of money is to let it lie in a bank account.
With interest rates of around five per cent and investment funds out there promising returns of up to eight per cent, why would an entrepreneur want to put his or her hard-earned cash at risk again?
Unless of course, their belief in Belfast and their wish to see the city prosper was to trump the advice of accountants and wealth-advisors.
That certainly seems to be the attitude of Pete Boyle who has just put his chips down again on the Belfast side of the board with the stunning makeover of a crumbling city-centre building.
City Printing Works, occupying the best part of what the Yanks would call a city block, is a stunning work of renovation and re-imagination.
BACK TO THE FUTURE: A refurbed floor in City Printing Works
It pays homage to the printers who once worked these hallowed factory floors while saluting the new century. In fact, look carefully at the restored floors and you can see the grooves worn into the woodwork at the spots where the printers once stood.
In terms of architecture, what came before in Belfast usually bests the brand-new. So it is with this Queen Street building.
For 50 years, the area around Castle Street and Queen Street had been in decline. Amazingly, Castle Street was more vibrant when I was a kid, making my way past the racks of parallels, Lord Anthony bomber jackets and Bay Street Rollers' jumpers in Frazer's clothes shop to the security gates at the top of Queen Street. Let me say that again: Castle Street, then the gateway from nationalist West Belfast into the heart of the city, was a busier and brighter commercial thoroughfare in the seventies, when the city was in flames, than it is today.
Thankfully, change is in the air.
In Queen Street, the new Queen's University student accommodation in the former Athletic Stores building, the relocated Golden Thread Gallery next door to the old print works and the Room2 Hotel have ignited a renaissance of this once proud area. However, the City Printing Works moves things up to another level.
I knew a guy once who was finance minister and came up with a plan to build a new office block on Castle Street but that plan, like him, is long forgotten!
The City Printing Works is 60 per cent occupied at present, hopefully with the growing interest in its space, especially from the film industry, it will soon be putting up the 'fully let' sign.
Good for you, Mr Boyle!
BOLD VISION: The author with Pete Boyle at a Printing Works open day on Friday
