Atlas in the news

Los Angeles Times 12/23/15 Edition Hotel Project in West Hollywood Gets $260 Million in Financing By James Rufus Koren http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-edition-hotel-20151224-story.html   L.A.’s newest trendy boutique hotel — a luxurious 190-room property with not one but two rooftop pools — is expected to rise from the Sunset Strip this spring now that the developers have received $260 million in financing. The project from New York developer Witkoff Group will be the first West Coast outpost for the Edition hotel brand, a collaboration between hospitality giant Marriott International and former nightclub impresario Ian Schrager, a pioneer of the boutique hotel business. The financing, disclosed this week and arranged by brokerage Jones Lang Lasalle, will cover most of the estimated $300-million construction budget for the project at Sunset Boulevard and Doheny Drive, which will include as many as 20 expensive condos. That price tag implies a very high-end property, fitting for its location on the Sunset Strip, which has become a magnet over the last few years for posh hotels. Developers have proposed or are building hotels at a handful of spots, including a 149-room hotel at the site of the now-closed House of Blues and another rumored for atop the old Hustler…

The San Diego Union-Tribune 12/23/15 San Diego Loses Its Only W Hotel By Lori Weisberg http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/dec/23/san-diego-loses-its-only-w-hotel/   San Diego’s only W hotel is no more, having converted this month to a Marriott-branded Renaissance following a decision by the owners to make a change in the management and name. A presence in downtown San Diego since it opened in December of 2002, the tony 258-room highrise was until this month part of the Starwood Hotels and Resorts portfolio. Its grand opening attracted a star-studded crowd of Hollywood celebs, sports figures and local politicians, and for years was best known for its hip rooftop bar, the Beach, which featured a heated sand-covered floor…  

Orange County Register 12/19/15 Now Coming to Airbnb, the Local Hotel By Lily Leung http://www.ocregister.com/articles/airbnb-696869-hotel-hotels.html   Airbnb, synonymous with strangers renting rooms to other strangers, is attracting a new kind of host: small-scale hotels and motels trying to hawk their rooms. The trend – visible in large metro areas, including New York City, Los Angeles and to some extent in Orange County – may seem counterintuitive. After all, hotels compete with Airbnb hosts for travelers. But the strategy makes financial sense. Airbnb charges hosts a 3 percent fee for every completed booking. That’s much less than the fees at Expedia and Priceline, traditional online travel companies that market and fill a bulk number of rooms for hotels in exchange for commissions. Such websites typically charge hotels up to 25 percent, according to Fast Company. What’s more, small-hotel operators view Airbnb, which claims it has served more than 60 million guests worldwide, as just another means of bringing in customers. “It’s smart opening up channels to do business (and) to get reservations you’re normally not getting,” said Alan X. Reay, president of Irvine-based Atlas Hospitality Group. The operators of Nomads Hotel, a seven-room establishment in San Clemente, hopped onto the Airbnb…

Los Angeles Times 12/09/15 Coming Soon to Two Mostly Muslim Countries: Trump Hotels By Christopher Reynolds http://www.latimes.com/travel/deals/la-trb-trouble-candidate-trump-hotels-20151208-story.html   While Donald Trump calls for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., Trump hotels face the challenge of making all guests feel welcome, and two new Trump hotels are supposed to open soon in Muslim-majority Azerbaijan and Indonesia. This tension between Trump the presidential candidate and Trump the hospitality company raises many questions. Will the Trump hotels try to distance themselves from the candidate? Will Trump’s caustic talk hurt Trump hotels abroad? How many travelers will feel comfortable in U.S. hotels bearing the Trump name? “I can’t imagine anyone of conscience wanting to step foot in one of his hotels,” said Jay Sorensen, president of Ideaworkscompany, a Wisconsin-based consulting firm that analyzes airline ancillary revenues. “This, I think, has reached a kind of tilting point.” The storm began Monday, when Trump called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S., a move that brought denunciations from political leaders across the spectrum. My phone calls and emails to Trump hotel executives in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas went unreturned on Tuesday. Trump Hotel Waikiki spokeswoman Alyssa Hui said “Our hotel welcomes…

San Francisco Business Times 12/02/15 CBRE Global Snaps Up High-Profile Peninsula Hotel By Nathan Donato-Weinstein http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2015/12/redwood-city-sofitel-hotel-acquisition-cbre-global.html The Bay Area’s booming hospitality sector means more development, higher room rates — and property sales. Case in point: Redwood City’s Sofitel San Francisco Bay has just sold to CBRE Global Investors, which paid $154.5 million for the 421-room luxury property this week, public records show. The price amounts to about $367,000 per room. “We just continue to be fairly bullish on the Bay Area in general, and that whole corridor from San Francisco to San Jose,” said John Sauter, a principal with CBRE Global. “This hotel has a unique position relative to all the corporate demand there, but there’s also not a lot of other nicer, leisure options in the Valley. We would put this in that category of a full-service, high-end hotel.” It’s the latest in a parade of large hospitality transactions in the Bay Area, and represents a nice profit for Prudential Real Estate Investors and joint-venture partner Lodging Capital. They bought the property in 2012 for $92.5 million, then pumped about $9 million into renovations. The hotel at 223 Twin Dolphin Drive was built in 1987 and includes 20,000 square…

Orange County Register 11/16/15 Hotel Mantra: Bigger Is Better, as a Travel Boom and Rising Room Rates Lead to Merger Mania By Jonathan Lansner http://www.ocregister.com/articles/hotel-692351-hotels-percent.html No business has been hotter than hotels coming out of the recession – and the money chasing that momentum has been equally impressive. Monday brought another megadeal to the industry, as hotel chain operator Marriott International said it would pay $12.2 billion for competitor Starwood Hotels and Resorts. The deal would create the world’s biggest hotel management company, operating or franchising 5,500 hotels with 1.1 million rooms worldwide. Locally, Starwood runs the St. Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point; Westin South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa; Sheraton Park Hotel in Anaheim; and Sheraton Garden Grove. Just two months ago, investment giant Blackstone Group – already owner of the Hilton and Motel 6 chains – said it would pay $6 billion for Strategic Hotel, owners of 17 luxury hotels, including Orange County’s Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel and Montage Laguna Beach. The buying spree means California hotels are in high demand. A record $4.4 billion was spent to buy 174 California hotels in the first half of this year, according to Irvine-based Atlas Hospitality Group, a hotel consulting…

Sacramento Business Journal 11/23/15 Construction Timeline for Sacramento Kings Hotel Tower Is Slipping By Ben van der Meer http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/blog/morning-roundup/2015/11/is-slipping.html   The cranes are in place, site work is underway and some tenants have been announced for the 16-story mixed-use tower opposite Golden 1 Center. Described as a complement to the arena, the tower is a focal point for the retail/entertainment area the Sacramento Kings call Downtown Commons. Plans call for the tower to accommodate 250 hotel rooms, 45,000 square feet of retail space, some office space and about 50 top-floor luxury condominiums. But less than a year before the team’s arena opens, contractors haven’t yet pulled permits for vertical construction. Given the usual timelines for such a building, that suggests the tower will still be under construction when the arena opens next fall. That casts serious doubt on team suggestions that the building would be partially open by the first game in October 2016. The team also may not make its goal of having the tower hotel, carrying the Kimpton brand, open in time to host NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament games in March 2017. Team officials, without elaboration, would only say the project is still on track to…

Silicon Valley Business Journal 11/18/15 Exclusive First Look: Why Sunnyvale’s Sleek New Millennium Hotel Is Being Built in Poland By Nathan Donato-Weinstein http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/11/18/exclusive-first-look-why-sunnyvales-sleek-new.html   Sometime in the next two years or so, craftsmen in Poland will put the finishing touches on 263 individual hotel rooms, then stack them on a single container ship bound for the Port of Oakland. From there, they’ll be trucked to a vacant lot in Sunnyvale, where they will be unloaded one by one and assembled on-site into Northern California’s first Millennium Hotel. It will go up in about 12 weeks. A similar prefab strategy will result in a 250-unit residential complex next door, but instead of a sea voyage, the apartments will take a six-day train trip from a factory in Idaho. “We are not only challenging ourselves to build a new, different kind of hotel,” said Aloysius Lee, group chief executive officer for Millennium Hotels and Resorts, the London-based company behind the project. “We are also challenging ourselves in using new technology, a new methodology of building.” The estimated $200 million development represents what could be the most ambitious modular construction effort yet undertaken in Silicon Valley. While prefabricated units have been used in…

The Orange County Register 10/30/15 Hyatt Regency in Garden Grove Sold to Chinese Buyer for $137 Million By Jonathan Lansner http://www.ocregister.com/articles/hotel-689967-hotels-room.html The rush for hotels rolls on: A Chinese construction company has just bought the Hyatt Regency Orange County in Garden Grove for $137 million. SCG America, the U.S. arm of the giant Shanghai Construction Group, acquired the 656-room hotel, built in 1986. The seller, the Xenia Hotels & Resorts real estate trust, paid $112 million for the hotel in 2008, near the previous real estate peak. The Chinese company is interested in the cash flow from the hotel’s operations as well as development potential on the 9.4- acre site, said Harry Pflueger, a principal with Maxim Hotel Brokerage, which helped SCG with the deal. Hyatt Regency, just down the street from Disneyland and the Anaheim Convention Center, should benefit from expansion plans for both places, Pflueger said. The hotel has been 77 percent full this year with an average room rate of $154 a night. “The market’s very hot,” said Pflueger, referring to the pace of California hotel deals. “Nobody has a perfect crystal ball, but there’s a pretty good three-year landing strip to this cycle.” This sale is…

The San Diego Union-Tribune 11/16/15 InterContinental Returning to San Diego By Lori Weisberg San Diego will see the return of long absent InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, with the development of a new 400-room hotel on the waterfront in downtown San Diego. The 19-story, $218.7 million hotel had been long planned, but it was only recently that the development team finalized plans with InterContinental to operate the luxury property. To read the rest of the article, please visit: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/nov/16/intercontinental-hotel-coming-san-diego-waterfront/

Los Angeles Times 11/16/15 Marriott’s Plan to Buy Starwood for $12.2 Billion Could Trigger More Hotel Mergers By Hugo Martin http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-marriott-starwood-20151116-story.html   Marriott International Inc.’s plan to acquire Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. will create the world’s largest hotel company and could trigger more mergers as rivals jockey to compete. The deal announced Monday to unite Marriott and Starwood, valued at about $12.2 billion, would create a hotel company with 5,500 hotels and more than 1.1 million rooms in more than 100 countries. The new behemoth would own 30 hotel brands including the Ritz-Carlton, JW Marriott, Courtyard, St. Regis, W, Sheraton and Westin. In the hotel world, “it’s the biggest transaction of our lifetime,” said Bjorn Hanson, a professor at New York University’s Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism. Bethesda, Md.-based Marriott has about 4,300 hotel properties in its portfolio, most of which are operated as franchises owned by private investors. Stamford, Conn.-based Starwood has about 1,200 hotels, with about half operated as franchises. In California, Marriott has 312 hotels and Starwood has 71. Marriott’s size and breadth after the acquisition could prompt other hotel companies, such as Intercontinental Hotel Group and Hilton Worldwide, to consider joining forces with…