Atlas in the news

New Gaylord Pacific Resort boosts room openings count With 1,600 keys, the Gaylord Pacific Resort & Convention Center in Chula Vista is the largest hotel to open in California during the first half of the year. (CoStar) By Bryan Wroten | CoStar News | July 11, 2025 | 6:38 AM The number of hotel openings in California grew during the first half of the year, and a large part of that is thanks to one hotel. Atlas Hospitality Group’s California Hotel Development Survey 2025 Mid-Year reports that 36 hotels opened during the first six months of 2025, a 64% year-over-year increase. The number of new rooms added during that time was 5,369, up 135% compared to last year. Of those rooms, 1,600 came from the Gaylord Pacific Resort & Convention Center that opened in May in Chula Vista. This property alone accounted for 52% of the 135% increase of new rooms added year over year. The Gaylord property is the biggest hotel to open in California in 33 years, Atlas President Alan Reay said. “I think that in itself speaks volumes about people’s desire, and perhaps even more so the city’s desires to help fund that kind of project,” he said. While the Gaylord opening certainly…

Hotel is an East Bay landmark By George Avalos | gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News GroupUPDATED: July 9, 2025 at 11:46 AM PDT OAKLAND — A lender has taken ownership of Oakland’s biggest hotel through a foreclosure that underscores the ailments and price nosedives that plague the Bay Area’s sickly lodging market. The Oakland Marriott City Center hotel was taken back by its lender, which bought the property for just under $70.2 million through the foreclosure. Default Resolution Network, which handled the foreclosure proceeding, provided the results of the transaction. Invesco CMI Investments filed the default against the hotel. Invesco CMI bought the loan in May 2024 from the original lender, Nataxis New York Branch, according to documents on file with the Alameda County Recorder’s Office. The loan that was foreclosed totaled $100 million, county documents show. The 500-room lodging tower, which has a choice location at 1001 Broadway next to the city’s convention center, is Oakland’s largest hotel. Numerous other hotels in the Bay Area have encountered loan defaults, foreclosures, and a plunge in their value as the region’s lodging sector struggles to convalesce from its coronavirus-linked economic maladies. “We are seeing a downturn in business travel for the Bay Area that is continuing post-COVID,”…

By John Gittelsohn | July 7, 2025 at 1:00 PM PDT French luxury giant LVMH Moët Hennessey Louis Vuitton SE is selling its only US hotel, the El Encanto in Santa Barbara, California. The 90-room property — in a coastal getaway northwest of Los Angeles — is being purchased by a partnership of brothers Justin and Tyler Mateen and Culver Capital, according to representatives for the buyers. The price is $82.2 million, they said. “We look at it as we’re buying 20% of the class A luxury hospitality market in Santa Barbara, which we believe is a growing market,” Tyler Mateen said in an interview Monday. The sale price per room — about $900,000 — is comparable to other recent resort transactions in coastal California, where strict government regulations and a scarcity of land create high barriers to entry, according to Alan Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality Group, a hotel brokerage based in Newport Beach. “It may look expensive today, but 10 or 20 years from now it looks like a good deal,” Reay said. A spokesperson for LVMH declined to comment on the transaction but said LVMH-owned Bvlgari Hotels & Resorts plans to open a hotel in Miami Beach, Florida, in 2028. The El Encanto’s…

By Roger Vincent – Staff Writer July 8, 2025 3 AM PT The five-star El Encanto resort in Santa Barbara, a Hollywood getaway for more than a century where rooms cost north of $1,000 a night, has been sold to Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen for $82.2 million. Mateen bought the historic hotel in one of the city’s exclusive hillside neighborhoods with his brother Tyler and Culver Capital. The 7-acre estate with terraced gardens and views of the Pacific Oceans was purchased from Belmond, the hospitality brand owned by luxury retailer LVMH, marking the sale of LVMH’s only hotel in the United States. The new owners plan to spend as much as $40 million to upgrade the 90-room resort that boasts its Old Hollywood guests included Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr and Carole Lombard. “It has a lot of California’s rich history and could be one of the nicest hotels in the U.S.,” Mateen said. “The bones and the structure are irreplaceable.” The Mateens have been on an investment spree, buying high-profile properties in Southern California locations where it’s hard to develop new projects. Last month they paid $69 million for retail property near the legendary TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard: the Hollywood Galaxy…

The conversion of the office building on Broadway to a hotel is believed to be the largest in California in recent memory By Lori Weisberg | The San Diego Union-Tribune | PUBLISHED: July 4, 2025 at 6:00 AM PDT A now vacant office high-rise in downtown San Diego will be transformed into a 560-room Hyatt hotel, marking what is believed to be the first such conversion in California in recent years. The $250 million project, proposed by San Diego-based developer J Street Space, is a slight pivot from earlier plans to convert the 25-story Tower 180 building on Broadway into a combination of residential and hotel uses. The cost of that plan was originally estimated at $140 million. While office-to-residential conversions are becoming more appealing to developers given the high office vacancy rates in many downtowns and the need for additional housing, J Street is bucking that trend. Its now revised plan calls for a dual-branded hotel, composed of a 371-room Hyatt Place and a 189-room Hyatt House. While the rooms are different in size and function within the two brands — with the Hyatt House geared more toward extended-stay travelers — they will be intermingled within both the tower building and an…

Developer J Street partners with Hyatt on $250 million hospitality complexBy Lou Hirsh | CoStar News | June 26, 2025 | 3:30 P.M. Developer J Street is planning what it calls one of the largest office-to-hospitality conversions ever undertaken in Southern California as owners around the country try to shift workspaces into a wider variety of more lucrative uses in the wake of the pandemic. J Street plans to convert the fully vacant 25-story Tower 180 office building, acquired by the San Diego developer in December 2023 for $61 million, into a 560-room hotel under the Hyatt Place and Hyatt House brands. The $250 million downtown San Diego redevelopment is to be carried out in collaboration with the Chicago-based global hotel operator, with construction set to start in early 2026 and conclude in the first half of 2028. The project “exemplifies the transformation of office space in primary urban markets in the post-pandemic world,” Nirav Shah, regional vice president of development for Hyatt, said in a statement. San Diego is among numerous U.S. cities posting higher vacancies in older office properties, especially in downtown hubs, as many of those buildings have been sold off during the past two years at prices well below…

Two of the properties are owned by the Wyndham hospitality group. Veronika Bondarenko | Updated: Jun 17, 2025 6:06 AM EDT n the tourism and hospitality industry, the first six months of 2025 were dominated by a number of high-profile airline bankruptcies. Following a wider restructuring that will take the budget airline private, Spirit Airlines  (SAVE)  emerged just four months after filing for Chapter 11 protection at the end of last year. Competitor and fellow Florida airline Silver Airways was more down on its luck, and after months of reassuring travelers that it would emerge from its heavy debt load swinging, had to accept a $5.77 million stalking horse bid that will barely make a dent in the $500 million owed to creditors. On June 11, Silver put out an ominous social media post telling anyone with a booked ticket to “not go to the airport” and seek any refunds from their credit cards as they were ceasing operations. ‘There was a lot of demand’: Motel 8 sale precedes loan default In the hotel space, there have been few big-name bankruptcies and a number of smaller ones. Throughout the spring, two Wyndham  (WH)  properties in California have needed to file for bankruptcy. The 102-room Super 8 in the Livermore suburb…