Atlas in the news
Landmark East Bay Claremont hotel is bought for more than $160 million
OAKLAND — The Claremont Club & Spa, an iconic hotel perched in the hills on the Oakland and Berkeley border, has been bought by a Bay Area real estate developer in a deal that tops $160 million. The hotel, part of the Fairmont chain, was bought for about $163.3 million, according to documents filed on May 12 with the Alameda County Recorder’s Office. Redwood City Ohana Real Estate Investors, acting through an affiliate, bought the hotel in an all-cash deal, the county records showed. The 276-room hotel is located at 41 Tunnel Road in Berkeley. Properties located both in Oakland and Berkeley were included in the property transaction, the county documents show. An affiliate headed up by Blum Capital Partners and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts sold the hotel site to the Ohana Real Estate Investors group, county and state public documents show. The late Richard Blum for many years was a principal executive of Blum Capital. Blum also was married to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California). “The purchase by Ohana really speaks to how people view trophy assets in great locations, such as the Claremont,” said Alan Reay, president of Irvine-based Atlas Hospitality Group, which tracks the hotel sector. The…
Blackstone nears $950M refi on Hotel del Coronado in San Diego
Blackstone nears $950M refi on Hotel del Coronado in San Diego Barclays leading CMBS deal on 1880s hotel Blackstone is nearing a $950 million deal to refinance its historic Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, The Real Deal has learned. Barclays is leading a commercial mortgage-backed securities package that will be backed solely by the 757-key hotel, located at 1500 Orange Avenue, according to data from Trepp and a source familiar with the matter. Blackstone declined to comment. The floating-rate, interest-only loan, which is expected to close later this month, is about 60 percent loan-to-value, according to Trepp, meaning the property is valued at about $1.6 billion. “It is such an iconic building,” Alan Reay, who runs hotel brokerage Atlas Hospitality Group, said of the hotel. “It’s impossible to duplicate or rebuild.” Blackstone bought the 134-year-old Hotel del Coronado, which sits on the southern end of San Diego’s Coronado peninsula, in 2015 as part of a larger $6 billion acquisition of Strategic Hotels and Resorts. Blackstone paid $600 million for the property, according to records. A year later, Blackstone had struck a deal to sell off the Hotel del Coronado — and the entire Strategic portfolio — to Anbang Insurance Group. However,…
Ohana Real Estate Investors buying Claremont Hotel Club &Spa
Several new liquor license applications related to the 276-room hotel, 41 Tunnel Road in Berkeley, indicate that Redwood City-based developer and investor Ohana Real Estate is in the process of acquiring the hotel. The luxury Fairmont Hotel chain and financier Richard Blum, the late husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, bought the hotel nearly a decade ago. Executives of Ohana Real Estate Investors — including Ohana’s chief financial officer, an asset management partner, and vice president of asset management — were named in the newapplications. The entity behind the applications is at the same mailing address as Ohana in Redwood City. The hotel property is anchored by a $120 million commercial mortgage-backed securities loan, which was refinanced in 2019 for$125 million and set to mature in July. A CMBS industry report notes “the property was listed for sale recently and is presently under contract” as of last month. Representatives of Ohana and Fairmont Hotels did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday morning, but I’ll update this story if I learn more. The acquisition price was not immediately available. FRHI Hotels &Resorts and the Blum group purchased the hotel from the Government of Singapore Investment Group in 2014 for…
Ohana buys Claremont Hotel & Spa on the Berkeley-Oakland border
Redwood City investor pays unknown price for the 276-room property appraised at $183 million MAY 10, 2023, 11:38 AMBy TRD Staff Ohana Real Estate is buying the 108-year-old Claremont Hotel & Spa, which straddles Berkeley and Oakland. The Redwood City-based investor is acquiring the 276-room hotel at 41 Tunnel Road in Claremont, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing liquor license applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The seller is Toronto-based FRHI Hotels & Resorts, which owns the luxury Fairmont Hotel brand, and the Blum Group, owned by financier Richard Blum, the late husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. They bought the landmark hotel in 2014 for $86 million, then launched a multimillion-dollar renovation. Executives of Ohana Real Estate Investors — including Ohana’s chief financial officer, an asset management partner, and vice president of asset management — were named in the new applications, according to the Business Times. The entity behind the applications is at the same mailing address as Ohana in Redwood City. The hotel property is anchored by a $120 million commercial mortgage-backed securities loan, which was refinanced in 2019 for $125 million and set to mature in July. A CMBS industry report notes “the property was listed for sale…
Bay Area hotel market wobbles in San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland
Famed San Francisco hotel’s “non-performing” loan gets shopped to buyers By GEORGE AVALOS | gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News GroupPUBLISHED: March 1, 2023 at 5:30 a.m. | UPDATED: March 1, 2023 at 1:28 p.m. Fresh signs have emerged that the Bay Area’s hotel market is wobbly — including efforts to scout for one or more investors willing to take over a faltering loan for a lodging icon that’s perched atop San Francisco’s famed Nob Hill. The Stanford Court Hotel, a historic lodging site at 905 California Street and one of the best-known hotels in the region, is the focal point of an attempt to find a new holder of the loan on the property, according to a marketing flyer reviewed by this news organization. The primary financing vehicle for The Stanford Court Hotel is a “non-performing senior loan with a total outstanding balance of $108.2 million,” stated the marketing package that’s being circulated by Eastdil Secured, a commercial real estate firm. Stanford Court isn’t the only historic hotel on Nob Hill that faces a delicate financial situation. The next block over, at 1075 California Street, the Huntington Hotel is in default on a $56.2 million loan on the property, San Francisco county records show. Deutsche Bank, the…
Report: Buyer Demand for CA Hotels Remains Strong
HOSPITALITY: 510 Transactions Total $8.6B in 2022 BY: KAREN PEARLMANAPRIL 6, 2023 After a record year in 2021 with 510 hotels transacted, buyer demand for hotels in California remains strong. The Newport Beach-headquartered Atlas Hospitality Group reports in its 2022 Year-End California Hotel Sales Survey, that last year marked the second-highest number of individual hotel sales at 483, down just 5.3% over 2021. Alan Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality Group, also reported that sales were at their third highest in dollar volume at $8.598 billion, with a new record for median price per room at $151,636. Reay reports that is up 10% over the record set in 2021. Reay said that at midyear 2022, experts actually had predicted a slowdown in the second half of the year with what was happening with interest rates, “but that simply didn’t happen.” “That tells us that buyer demand for hotels in California remains very strong,” he said. San Diego County had a 30.6% decrease in individual transactions, from 49 to 34. Total dollar volume was down 33%. The county’s average price per room increased 15.4%, while the median price per room decreased by 4.2%. Atlas reports that the 417-room Hyatt Regency La Jolla…
2023 Development Update: Los Angeles
Revamped icons and bold newcomers help shape LA’s hospitality renaissance Words by: Will Speros • Photos by Sam Frost, Caylon Hackwith, and the Ingalls Although 2022 saw rising costs lead to a slowdown in Los Angeles hotel development, Atlas Hospitality Group reports, the city still closed the year with the third-biggest hotel construction pipeline in the U.S. According to Lodging Econometrics, LA entered 2023 with 122 projects and 19,419 guestrooms in the pipeline, and also held the second-highest number of projects in early planning at 61. Indeed, the market is no match for a destination that senior vice president Bruce Ford says is experiencing “a big wave of renovation and conversion activity.” Here, we explore a few of these newcomers, from revamps of existing icons to new-builds changing the LA skyline. The Georgian Designed by Fettle, the newly reborn Georgian hotel reinterprets Art Deco themes in its Sunset Bar One particular city landmark, the Georgian, is newly reborn following an acquisition by hospitality development company BLVD. The local office of architecture and design practice Fettle was tapped to set a new course for the future of Santa Monica’s First Lady. “The idea was really to restore the building to her former and…
Appraisal Meant to Determine if Housing Commission Overpaid for Pandemic-Era Hotel Can’t Answer That Question
by Andrew Keatts | March 17, 2023 It didn’t answer the question. The San Diego Housing Commission released to the City Council Thursday the new appraisal of a Mission Valley hotel it bought to turn into housing for formerly homeless people. Nearly three years ago, the Housing Commission acquired the property for $67 million with the help of a broker who, the agency later learned, bought 40,000 shares in the company that sold the hotel before he identified it as a target and negotiated the purchase price. The controversy immediately raised the question: Did the city overpay for the hotel that was purchased under the cloud of a conflict of interest-scandal? That’s because of the original purchase appraisal. The appraiser determined the value of the hotel as though it was February 2020. But the city bought the hotel in August 2020, after Covid-19 completely shut down the tourism industry. Why Housing Commission officials would backdate the appraisal and what the hotel would have been worth if they had not has been unclear. After the broker faced a lawsuit from the city for his alleged conflict of interest and the scandal set in, the Housing Commission set in motion a new appraisal to clear it all up. But…
Over-the-top bar and restaurant scene, high-rise hotels set to open in downtown L.A.
BY ROGER VINCENT STAFF WRITER Photography by ROBERT GAUTHIER APRIL 3, 2023 5 AM PT A high-rise with two hotels and an over-the-top restaurant and bar scene is set to open this month by Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles as travelers embrace the road again and the hospitality business climbs out of the crater it sunk into during the pandemic. The builders hope that events at the arena and the adjacent Los Angeles Convention Center will drive overnight business to the hotels and help tempt locals to cavort in the 12 bars, restaurants and clubs that will be a prime feature of the Moxy and AC complex at Figueroa Street and Pico Boulevard. Moxy and AC are hotel brands operated by Marriott International, which is already the biggest hotelier in the neighborhood with the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton at L.A. Live as well as an adjacent tower containing both Courtyard and Residence Inn hotels. Marriott put multiple brands in downtown L.A. to serve a range of reasons people travel such as leisure, business and conferences, said Chief Executive Anthony Capuano. With the new hotels, Marriott will manage 3,200 rooms in six inns. The hostelries are part of billions of dollars of development that has transformed…
California hotel sales finish 2022 better than expected
CHERYL SARFATYTHE NORTH BAY BUSINESS JOURNALMarch 21, 2023 After a strong first half of 2022, California hotel sales in the second half of the year were predicted to show a large drop because of increased interest rates and economic uncertainties. But according to a report by Atlas Hospitality Group, a Newport Beach-based commercial real estate firm specializing in the sale of California hotels, that didn’t happen. “It seems that there is a large pool of buyers who are willing to purchase quality California hotel deals at prices at, or below, the cost of financing, which is something we have rarely seen before,” Atlas stated in its 2022 Year-End California Hotel Sales Survey, released March 7. “The lack of new supply of hotels combined with upward inflationary pressures are some of the main reasons buyers remain extremely bullish on California hotel investments.” Last year in the North Bay, most of the sales activity took place in Sonoma County, with 16 hotels sold, according to Atlas. The most expensive transaction in the county was the 226-room Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn, located at 100 Boyes Blvd., in Sonoma. Brookfield Asset Management bought the property for $267.1 million, according to Atlas. The deal closed Oct….
Residence Inn sells for $28M in East Bay
Transaction aligns with declining hotel room values San Francisco / September 16, 2022 08:30 AMBy Pawan Naidu | Research By Christian Bautista and Caysey Welton Hotels aren’t worth what they used to be, but they’re still worth a lot. A Residence Inn hotel in an East Bay suburb sold for $28.5 million, or $226,000 per room, according to public records. Despite the somewhat sizable transaction, the buyer and seller have been mostly flying under the radar in California real estate. The seller was real estate investor Rao Yalamanchili, who’s been busy this year in the residential sector, adding $68 million to his portfolio with the acquisition of three properties. The buyer is listed as Los Angeles-based Five Rivers Hospitality LLC. A thorough search yields very limited information on the entity. It was registered as an LLC by Jagpreet Sandhu in February of this year, according to California state records. Residence Inn by Marriott Pleasant Hill Concord is located at 700 Ellinwood Way in Pleasant Hill and has 126-units. The 50,700 square-foot hotel was built in 1991. Yalamanchili purchased it three years ago for $25.3 million. The Residence Inn–which operates under the Marriott brand umbrella–sold for less than a recent traditional hotel transaction in the bay area when Pebblebrook Hotel Trust sold…
Bay Area hotel purchases slump amid inflation, price uncertainty
Hotel purchases show weakness during first half of 2022 By GEORGE AVALOS | gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group PUBLISHED: September 12, 2022 at 1:30 p.m. | UPDATED: September 13, 2022 at 4:56 a.m. The Bay Area market for hotel purchases slumped during the first half of 2022 compared to the same period the year before amid inflation woes and fast-rising interest rates. The total dollar volume for hotels bought in the nine-county Bay Area was $660.5 million, according to research Atlas Hospitality Group provided to this news organization. That was down 66.8% from the $1.99 billion in hotel purchases during the first six months of 2021, the Atlas Hospitality research showed. “Interest rates and inflation are increasing, which makes it harder to complete deals,” said Alan Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality, which tracks the California lodging market. The challenges have arisen despite the easing of COVID pandemic restrictions and a corresponding increase in the number of people traveling. But the hotel market is not alone — rising interest rates and inflation have also plagued the state’s housing and office markets, as well, causing some would-be buyers to reconsider. It appears that the Bay Area hotel market is considerably weaker than the lodging sector statewide. During the…
