Atlas in the news

The San Diego Union-Tribune 12/09/16 Mission Valley’s Hanalei Hotel Is Sold By Lori Weisberg http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/sd-fi-hanalei-sale-20161209-story.html   The Crowne Plaza Hanalei, one of Mission Valley’s oldest hotels, has sold for nearly $49 million. Built in 1959 and last renovated in 2006, the 419-room property was sold to a private client of Irvine-based Brighton Management, which manages hotels in California, Colorado, Florida, Connecticut and New Mexico. The only other San Diego County hotels in its portfolio are National City and a Holiday Inn in Oceanside. Brighton plans to undertake a significant renovation of the aging 10-acre property but is not far enough along to provide more details on the scope or investment, said special account manager David Wei. The seller, Hanalei Associates, which has Multi-Ventures, Inc. as its managing member, originally purchased the hotel in 1996 for $14.6 million. “I’ve been in the hotel business for 30-plus years and I simply decided it was in my best interest to get out of the business,” said Robert Payne, CEO of Multi-Ventures a real estate development and hotel company that previously owned the Mission Valley Hilton. “I saw it as an opportunity for new ownership to take over and expand the facility and I…

Silicon Valley Business Journal 12/05/16 New High-end Hotel Brand Arrives in Silicon Valley By Bryce Druzin http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/12/05/new-high-end-hotel-brand-arrives-in-silicon-valley.html   A new hotel brand has taken over the former site of Beverly Heritage Hotel in Milpitas. The 236-room hotel is now Sonesta Silicon Valley. Sonesta International Hotels Corp. has more than 60 hotels in seven countries, including 37 in the United States, but the Milpitas location at 1820 Barber Lane is their first hotel on the West Coast. “We’ve had aspirations on California for a long time,” said Carlos Flores, Sonesta president and CEO. “Silicon Valley being a very unique market in a very fruitful economy, overall from a business perspective it makes it a very good outpost.” Sonesta competes with luxury brand hotels, according to Alan X. Reay of Atlas Hospitality Group, a hotel consultancy. Reay described the brand as “slightly below” Ritz Carlton and Four Seasons and said the Milpitas hotel will compete against full-service Marriotts and Hiltons. Reay said the biggest challenge Sonesta’s newest location faces is a lack of name recognition in the California market. Hospitality Properties Trust, a publicly traded REIT that buys and leases out hotels to brands, owns the property. According to a Q2 2016…

Bisnow 11/10/16 Weighing the Hospitality Boom in LA By Karen Jordan https://www.bisnow.com/los-angeles/news/hotel/lodging-trends-67441   The number of hotels being built in LA is exploding. Are they too much of a good thing? Atlas Hospitality Group president Alan Reay said LA County has 40 hotels under construction with more than 7,000 rooms. The last record was 10 years ago with 1,400 rooms, Alan told our moderator, Pankow project executive Peter Loeb , and the more than 200 people who attended the recent Bisnow LA Hospitality Development Boom event at the Omni Hotel in DTLA. The US leads the world in the number of hotels under construction with LA the No. 3 market after New York and Houston, according to Alan. He said the question now is whether LA is overbuilding. Alan said it could be an issue in the short term compared to other convention center markets. However, many conferences have bypassed LA in the past because of the lack of hotel rooms. There are also certain incentives fueling the boom, HKS senior designer Jessica Sager said. They include the transient occupancy transit rebate that her firm has seen used by a client in Anaheim. Brands are also working hard these days to…

Los Angeles Times 11/01/16 Beverly Hills Squeezes Chinese Hotel Builder for Big Bucks Instead of Offering a Handout By Michael Hiltzik http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-wanda-payout-20161101-story.html   The tradition in real estate development in recent years has gone something like this: Developer proposes mega-project, developer claims project will transform city into something great, city gives developer millions in tax abatements and other handouts to make the deal happen. Beverly Hills may just have turned the payout spigot the other way. In a tentative deal announced late last week, the Chinese firm Wanda Group agreed to increase its fees to the city by more than a half-billion dollars over 30 years to win approval of a luxury condo-hotel project near the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards. Everyone involved in the negotiations expresses satisfaction with the terms. “This is by far the best development agreement ever negotiated for Beverly Hills, and possibly the richest development agreement per square foot negotiated anywhere by a municipality,” said Mayor John Mirisch, who reached the agreement as one of two members of the city’s ad hoc committee examining the project. His colleague on the committee, Councilwoman Lili Bosse, agrees. And Rohan a’Beckett, Wanda’s manager at the project, calls…

Los Angeles Times 10/24/16 Park Hyatt Hotel Is Set to Join the Downtown L.A. Building Boom By Andrew Khouri http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-downtown-hyatt-20161024-snap-story.html   The $1-billion Oceanwide Plaza development, under construction in downtown Los Angeles, will include a luxury Park Hyatt hotel, underscoring the resurgence of the city center. The Hyatt Hotels Corp. brand is in just 38 locations worldwide and currently has no locations in Los Angeles. Its arrival across from Staples Center could help the Oceanwide condo and hotel project stand out in a neighborhood awash in construction. Nearby, Chinese developer Greenland Group is underway on another $1-billion condo and hotel project known as Metropolis that will include a 350-room Hotel Indigo, a hip boutique brand operated by InterContinental Hotels Group. Other big projects include a 900-room InterContinental hotel inside the nearly completed Wilshire Grand skyscraper and a proposal for a W Hotel that would replace the Luxe City Center Hotel across from L.A. Live. “Every major hotel brand needs to have a presence downtown,” said Alan X. Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality Group. “Fifteen to 20 years ago people were exiting downtown. It’s sort of night and day.” Beijing-based Oceanwide Holdings and Hyatt announced their plans Monday. The 184-room Park…

Orange County Register 10/24/16 Veteran Hotel Developers Talk Building Boom, Under Demolished and Overbuilt Areas By Hannah Madans http://www.ocregister.com/articles/olson-733128-hotel-hotels.html   More public spaces. Catering to international visitors. Hotels with local flair. Those are just a few trends veteran developer Bob Olson is seeing in the hotel industry. He owns Irvine-based R.D. Olson Construction and Newport Beach-based R.D. Olson Development, both of which are juggling half a dozen hotel projects in an industry seeing years of growth after the Great Recession. Hotel expansion in Orange County is ongoing, as developers (in addition to Olson) build out 10 new hotels, which will add 1,504 rooms to the marketplace. Six hotels already have opened this year, according to Irvine-based Atlas Hospitality Group. “There are markets that are getting overbuilt,” Olson said. “The losers in those markets will be the old hotels. It’s not that we’ll be overbuilt – we’ll be under-demolished.” Alan Reay, president of the Irvine-based real estate company Atlas Hospitality Group, agrees. “Year-to-date hotel rooms under construction for the U.S. are up almost 30 percent from where they were last year,” Reay said. “A lot of people are worried that we’re building too many hotel rooms. “It’s really a big threat…

Bisnow 10/19/16 Hospitality Is Booming in LA By Karen Jordan https://www.bisnow.com/los-angeles/news/commercial-real-estate/hospitality-booming-in-la-66557   Other industry leaders scheduled to speak include the Athens Group COO Jay Newman, LA Department of Convention & Tourism Development executive developer Robert Ovrom, Steinberg president and CEO David Hart, PCL Construction VP and district manager Jack Sample, and Atlas Hospitality Group president Alan Reay. There will also be a “fireside chat” with Two Roads Hospitality co-chairman Rob Lowe. Join us for Bisnow’s fourth annual LA Hospitality Development Boom event, starting at 7:30am tomorrow. The hospitality business is hot in LA. Some heavy hitters are lined up to discuss the industry and trends at Bisnow’s fourth annual LA Hospitality Development Boom event tomorrow at the Omni Hotel in downtown LA. Ollie regional director of business development Ellen Parry tells Bisnow Ollie is specifically focused on improving traditional rental offerings with “strengthened community engagement” and “high-impact services” for its residents. The firm also is committed to studying the pain points urban residents face, namely affordability and convenience, she says. Ollie then identifies ways to address them through hospitality efforts and density planning, Ellen says.

Sacramento Business Journal 10/06/16 Motel Operators Coming to the End of the Road By Mark Anderson http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2016/10/06/cover-story-motel-operators-coming-to-the-end-of.html   Like a skeleton of the old highway system, many aging motels mark where main roads existed 60 years ago. Many of the motels continue operating more than a half-century after the freeways moved elsewhere. And even without the traffic they once received, many of these small, old properties continue to generate cash flow. They provide their operators, many of whom are families, with homes and steady income… Family businesses at the brink Motels often provide both a place to live and a livelihood for their owners, so they are often not very interested in selling, even for a strong profit, said Alan Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality Group, a hotel brokerage based in Irvine. The motel business is not highly profitable — and it is definitely not glamorous — but it is a living, he said. And motels are often so small that they need to be family operations, Reay said. “They cannot pencil out with professional staff.” In the next few years, the pressure on these motels may finally push them past the brink. “These old buildings are now getting very…

Silicon Valley Business Journal 08/31/16 Unfamiliar Hotel Brand Coming to Santa Clara Near Levi’s Stadium By Bryce Druzin http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/08/31/unfamiliar-hotel-brand-coming-to-santa-clara-near.html Santa Clara’s high hotel occupancy rate is caused by “tremendous demand and room shortages,” according to hotel expert Alan X. Reay.