Tag: four star hotel

Ibosa To Convert Hotel Foxá Into Luxury Homes

30 November 2016 – Cinco Días

The Hotel Foxá located next to Chamartín train station will soon disappear to be converted into a residential tower containing luxury homes, worth up to €1 million each. According to the property developer, the Ibosa Group, the design will adopt a “New York architecture” style.

The company, which manages housing cooperatives, will spend €30 million (including the purchase of the building) on the project to convert the former Hotel Foxá M-30 in Madrid – which has been closed since 2013 – into a 16-storey residential complex containing 72 homes, which are expected to be handed over to their owners during the final quarter of 2018.

70% of the homes in the tower, known as Torre Borealis, have already been sold and the demolition work is expected to begin next spring, once all of the properties have been sold. The construction work will involve the complete renovation of the building, including a total transformation of the façade, according to explanations provided by the Head of Ibosa.

In fact, the company expects to obtain the licence that it needs to undertake the work at the building within the next few weeks. The property previously housed a four star hotel for 13 years.

The price of the homes will range from €175,000 to €900,000, with each property containing between one and four bedrooms. Moreover, the constructed surface area will range between 40m2 and 200m2 per apartment. The building, located on Calle Serrano Galvache 14, will have a double height entrance hall and 1,000 m2 of common areas, including a “gastroteca”, a swimming pool and a gym. There will be several different types of apartments, including ground floor duplexes, (normal) duplexes and penthouses with terraces up to 120m2.

Hotel Foxá M-30 closed its doors after the company Trome, owned by the businessman Mariano Moreno Fernández, was declared bankrupt, with debt amounting to around €300 million. The company used to own several hotels and spas.

Original story: Cinco Días

Translation: Carmel Drake

Benson Elliot Buys Hotel Silken In Barcelona For €80M

7 October 2016 – Expansión

A major operation and better gains for Bank of America Merril Lynch in Barcelona. The US entity is finalising the sale of Hotel Silken Diagonal for €80 million to a group of investors led by the British fund Benson Elliot. Bank of America will generate capital gains of €50 million from the property in just one year, given that it took over the hotel in 2015 when it foreclosed the debt relating to the property, amounting to €27 million.

According to sources close to the operation, the sale has not been signed yet, although the vendor has entered into an exclusivity period with the purchaser group.

Bank of America Merril Lynch ended up with the mortgage loan following the crisis of the Urvasco group, the parent company of the Silken hotel chain, after it filed for bankruptcy.

The property has 240 rooms and a four-star rating. It is located in the 22@ district of Barcelona, next to the Torre Agbar, and it has a management contract with Silken. The operation has been advised by JLL, which declined to comment on the operation yesterday.

The amount (€80 million) that Benson Elliot has paid together with another investor group, whose name has not been revealed, has been described as exorbitant by several sources in the real estate sector, who point out that the building is located away from the city centre in Barcelona, in an area that suffered a lot at the beginning of the crisis.

Nevertheless, the same sources also indicate that the hotel moratorium applied in Barcelona last year by the mayoress Ada Colau, together with the strong investor appetite for assets in the Catalan capital and the shortage of buildings on the market, have driven up the price of the few properties that have come onto the market. Bank of America put this asset on the market a few months ago and several international investors submitted bids for it.

Original story: Expansión (by Marisa Anglés)

Translation: Carmel Drake

INE: Overnight Hotel Stays Reached 46.4M In August

26 September 2016 – Expansión

Overnight stays rose by 3.8% and revenues increased by almost 9% in August 2016, boosted by visits from overseas tourists. Nevertheless, domestic demand only increased in Cataluña.

Although the summer season does not officially end until October, Spain’s hotels can already say with some satisfaction that the summer of 2016 has been one of the best of their lives. The average occupancy rate reached 79% in August, the best figure since analysis of this data first began back in 1999, according to a report published on Friday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

In the eighth month of the year alone, 46.4 million overnight hotels stays were recorded, up by 3.8% compared with August last year, thanks to a 6.3% increase in stays by foreign tourists; overnight stays by Spanish tourists decreased by 0.3% YoY.

But it was not only a quantitative increase, given that establishments also increased their revenues. They obtained €79.57 for each available room, compared with €73.10 in August 2015. The Hotel Price Index (IPH) carried a lot of weight in that YoY increase of 8.8%. The IPH is prepared on the basis of prices that businessmen in the sector receive from all of their clients: households, companies, tour operators and travel agents. The IPH stood at 6.9% in August, which represents 1.9 points more than a year ago.

Over the last twelve months, revenues have increased by 5.2% on average, with the most acute increases being observed for three-star (9.01% YoY in August) and four-star accommodation (6.97%).

INE’s information reveals that overnight stays in July and August grew by 5.4% compared with the same two month period in 2015, thanks both to record levels of international tourists (9.6 million visited in July, up by 9.3%) as well as the gradual recovery of domestic demand. In this aggregated period, overnight stays by foreigners and Spaniards rose by 7.2% and 2.4%, respectively (…).

Original story: Expansión (by Yago González)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Hispania Buys Hotel Paradise Portinatx In Ibiza For €11M

19 July 2016 – Expansión

The Socimi Hispania Activos Inmobiliarios has acquired 100% of the shares in the company Later Deruser, owner of the Hotel Paradise Portinatx in Ibiza (Balearic Islands), for €11 million, which will now be operated by Barceló.

Hispania has performed the operation through its subsidiary Bay Hotels & Leisure, according to a statement filed with Spain’s National Securities and Markets Commission (CNMV).

Hotel Paradise Portinatx is a three-star facility, with 134 rooms.

As part of its investment strategy, Hispania will undertake a comprehensive refurbishment of the property, spending approximately €8 million, to increase it to an “adult only” 4-star hotel.

The Barceló Group will operate the hotel through a lease contract (with fixed and variable elements) under a framework agreement that covers all of the hotels operated by the group.

The asset is located on Playa de Portinatx, right on the beach. The town of Portinatx, in the north of the island, is seeing a significant upgrade of its hotel offerings.

According to available data about occupancy rates and average revenues per room, Ibiza has established itself as one of the primary destinations in the Mediterranean.

Hispania considers that there are still attractive investment opportunities in the hotel sector, as it gains presence in vacation destinations with growth potential, as well as in privileged locations.

According to the CEO of Hispania, Concha Osácar, this operation shows, once again, that the Balearic Islands – and Ibiza in particular, which is the best performing island in the region – are a key market for Hispania.

Currently, Hispania owns four hotels on the island: the recently repositioned Hotel Barceló Pueblo Ibiza, and three hotels recently purchased in Cala de San Miguel, which will be repositioned in 2017.

Original story: Expansión

Translation: Carmel Drake

HI Partners Buy A Hotel From Lopesan For €42M

18 July 2016 – Expansión

HI Partners have completed a new operation in the hotel investment market. The subsidiary of Banco Sabadell has just acquired a four-star, 402-room hotel on Playa del Inglés, on the island of Gran Canaria for €42.4 million. Until now, the property, known as the IFA Catarina, which overlooks the Dunas de Maspalomas, belonged to the IFA Hotel & Touristik Group, which is listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange. That company is controlled by the Spanish hotel group Lopesan (52% stake), with whom HI Partners has signed a “sale and management back” contract, which means that it will continue operating the hotel after the sale.

The aim of HI Partners is to invest €7 million in IFA Catarina to refurbish its rooms and improve the hotel’s facilities, which will include areas dedicated exclusively to adult customers only.

This is the first operation that HI Partners has completed in the Canary Islands. This year, the hotel investment and management company has also purchased Hotel Terramar de Sitges (Barcelona) and its portfolio now contain 25 properties. In March, it joined forces with the US fund Starwood Capital to invest €500 million in the purchase of vacation hotels, although this operation falls outside of that agreement.

Original story: Expansión (by Sergi Sabori)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Derby Hotels’ Assets Are Worth €800M

23 June 2016 – Expansión

Family owned chain / The Group chaired by Jordi Clos owns 12 hotels and 10 apartment buildings, and has a gearing ratio of 11.2%.

The Catalan businessman Jordi Clos, owner of Derby Hotels and the Egyptian Museum of Barcelona, and the Chairman of the Barcelona Hotel Association, has created a real estate empire from scratch that is now worth €800 million. Few hotel chains in Spain are so asset rich, given that the group owns all twelve of its hotels and all ten of the tourist apartment buildings that it operates. Its gearing ratio is also unusually low: 11.2% of the total asset value, at around €90 million.

In addition to the properties for tourist use, which are located in London, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona, the group also owns several office buildings, homes and car parks, which it holds purely for real estate investment purposes.

Derby Hotels, which moved its headquarters from Barcelona to Madrid a few months ago, recorded revenues of €74.3 million in 2015, up by 6.4% compared with the previous year. Of that amount, €67 million was generated by the hotel business and the remainder, from the operation of the tourist apartments.

The only building in this family-owned chain that precedes Jordi Clos is the Hotel Derby, which his father-in-law opened in Barcelona in 1968. The businessman has opened all of the other properties, over a thirty year period from 1983 until 2013.

In some cases, Clos acquired his properties with investment partners, before going on to buy out their stakes years later. Such is the case of the Caesar Hotel in London, which he purchased together with the Metropolis real estate fund in 2004 for €30 million (each party acquired a 50% stake). In 2009, he joined forces with that fund again to acquire the Hotel Banke in Paris for €75 million. In 2013, Clos purchased the shares that Metropolis held in those two hotels in an operation that valued the assets at €120 million in total.

A similar case was that of Hotel Bagués in Barcelona, which he opened in 2010 with the Bagués Masriera family, owners of the building that the jewellers of the same name had occupied for decades. Last year, Close purchased the remaining 40% stake that the jewellers still held for €3.8 million.

Searching for new properties

Now, having digested the purchase of the 50% stakes of the hotels in London and Paris, Derby wants to continue to expand its empire in Europe. “Barcelona has been ruled out due to the hotel moratorium there and, we already have two five-star hotels in Madrid”, explained Clos. “Instead, we want to continue to diversify our risk by opening hotels in other cities, such as Amsterdam and Munich, although we are also looking at Copenhagen and Stockholm”.

The terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 directly affected the Group’s hotels in the French capital. Clos estimates that the occupancy rate there fell by 15% and average prices decreased by 20%. “If we weren’t a diversified chain with a low gearing ratio, it would have been hard for us to survive the winter in Paris”, he added.

Indeed, Hotel Banke had just increased its rating from four to five-stars following the remodelling of its 91 rooms. Now, the group is planning to raise the category of its hotel in London too, to a superior four-star property. To this end, it plans to increase the size of its rooms and reduce the total number from 140 to 120.

Original story: Expansión (by Marisa Anglés)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Overnight Hotel Stays Rose By 12.4% In February

28 March 2016 – Expansión

Hotel establishments recorded a total of 16.3 million overnight stays last month, up by 12.4% compared to February 2015.

During the first two months of 2016, overnight hotel stays grew by 10.4% with respect to the same period last year, according to figures released on Wednesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

The increase in February was due to a 13.3% increase in overnight stays by non-resident visitors to Spain and a 11.2% increase in stays by residents. In addition, the average duration of stays in February amounted to 2.9 nights per user.

On the other hand, during the second month of 2016, 49.1% of all available places were occupied, which represented a YoY increase of 7.6%. Specifically, the occupancy rate on the weekend grew by 6.4%, to reach 57.2%. By region, occupancy rates in the Canary Islands were the highest, with an average of 77.9%, followed by Madrid (53.4%) and the Balearic Islands (48.9%).

The average daily rate (ADR) per occupied room amounted to €76.60, up by 7.9% compared with February 2015 and the revenue per available room (RevPar) amounted to €43.10, up by 16.5%.

By category, the average rate was €171.20 for five-star hotels, €80.70 for four-star hotels and €57.90 for three-star hotels.

Original story: Expansión

Translation: Carmel Drake

Colonial To Open 4-Star Hotel In Former Palace In Almería

9 June 2015 – Expansión

The real estate group Colonial is branching out from its traditional office market. It will open a resort hotel in Mojácar (Almería) in the next few weeks.

(…)

The building has been closed for years and so Colonial has undertaken a complete renovation of the property over the last few months. The facilities include the former Palace of the Marqués de Chávarri, constructed at the beginning of the last century, which will house some of the hotel’s common areas as well as some of the suites. It also has a large modern annex building which contains 140 rooms in total.

The hotel will be operated by the Catalan chain Fergus, under its Fergus Style brand. It will be called the Gran Hotel Palacio de la Marina and will be a four star establishment. It is located in the Marina de la Torre development, next to Marina Golf, an 18-hole course. The hotel has a fitness room, spa and several rooms for conferences and events.

Fergus Hotels, headquartered in Santa Susanna (Barcelona) operates 17 hotels in Mallorca, Ibiza, the coast of Barcelona, the Costa Brava (Gerona) and the coast of Almería.

(…)

Original story: Expansión

Translation: Carmel Drake

Barceló Sells Hotel In Tenerife To Chinese Group ‘Kangde’

23 April 2015 – Expansión

Another transaction in the Spanish hotel sector has a foreign buyer. Barceló has sold the Hotel Barceló Santiago (in Tenerife) to the Chinese group Chongqing Kangde Industrial. Negotiations began in 2013, when Barceló and Kangde signed a framework agreement to explore options together.

After more than a year of meetings, the Spanish tourism group agreed the sale of the property to Kangde. According to the Chinese group’s website, the alliance was signed during Lu Chaokang’s tour of Europe in search of investment opportunities. Chaokang, the Chairman of Kangde, visited a dozen projects in Budapest, Madrid, Barcelona and the Canary Islands.

Consideration of €50 million

The sale, which amounted to around €50 million, has not been formalised yet, as the buyer is still waiting to receive approval (of the purchase) from the Chinese government. The deadline for obtaining the backing ends in May. Nevertheless, according to industry sources, Barceló has already received confirmation that the transaction will close on time.

The Spanish chain will continue to manage the four-star hotel, which has 406 rooms and is located close to the Playa de los Gigantes. However, Kangde may be interested in renovating the property and increasing its (star) rating. In 2006, Barceló invested €7 million in the refurbishment of Hotel Santiago, which entered its portfolio in 1995. The sale of the hotel forms part of the process designed by Barceló to reduce its exposure to real estate, which has reached a historic high – (it owns) almost 63% of all of its rooms. The major milestone on this roadmap has been the creation of the Socimi, Bay, together with Hispania. Barceló will transfer 16 hotels and two shopping centres worth €421 million to the Socimi and whereby reduce the percentage of rooms it owns to 43%.

In 2014, Barceló recorded a profit of €46.4 million, up 85.6% on the previous year and a turnover of €2,056.6 million.

Original story: Expansión (by Yovanna Blanco)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Holiday Inn Bernabéu Files For Bankruptcy

20 April 2015 – Expansión

Madrid / The hotel, which continues to be operational, filed for voluntary bankruptcy at the beginning of this year in order to renegotiate its debt.

Leading Hospitality, the company controlled by the businessman César Losada, which owns the Holiday Inn Madrid Bernabéu hotel and the Hotel Maza in Zaragoza, has filed for bankruptcy to try to restructure its debt and forge ahead (with its business). On 13 January, Leading Hospitality voluntarily adopted this legal status and almost a month later, Commercial Court no. 9 in Madrid declared the procedure open, according to the company’s annual report for the financial year 2014.

Gregorio de la Morena, managing partner at DLM Insolvia, has been appointed as the bankruptcy administrator, although Losada and his team continue to manage the hotel, which is still operational. Sources close to Losada explain that the company filed for bankruptcy because “it had cash flow problems, which prevented it from meeting its short-term debt commitments”. Nevertheless, the intention is that the company will avoid filing for liquidation and instead reach an agreement with its creditors and continue operating.

For the time being, the company is waiting for the bankruptcy administrator to prepare the list of creditors to start negotiations. In addition, Leading Hospitality expects to file a collective dismissal plan (‘expediente de regulación de empleo’ or ERE) to reduce its wage bill – the scope of (that agreement) is being negotiated with the bankruptcy administrators. The hotel employs around 150 people.

In 2013, Leading Hospitality recorded revenues of €7.33 million, but it generated a negative operating profit of -€2.32 million. Net losses reached -€1.92 million and last year, the company also ended the year in the red.

Debt

At the end of 2013, the company had long-term debt amounting to €7.62 million and short-term debt amounting to €1.55 million, as well as several mortgage loans on both of its hotels – with Bankinter over its property in Madrid. Staff salaries and compensation payments amounted to €4.17 million in 2013.

In the accounts for that year, approved in December 2014, the auditor warned that the company was experiencing on-going cash flow problems (to be able to afford to pay) its employees, suppliers and financial partners. And it pointed to the management team’s plan to continue the refurbishment of the hotel, which it says is worth €27 million, and reduce the number of staff.

At the end of 2012, the businessman César Losada became the majority shareholder in the Madrid hotel, after acquiring a 51% stake from the InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG). Losada, who is behind the hotel investment company Losan Hotels World, invested €22 million in the acquisition and refurbishment of the four star hotel, which has 313 rooms. The asset is also owned by other individual shareholders and Losada intends to acquire their respective stakes (over time). Following the change of ownership in 2012, the hotel retained the Holiday Inn brand, which is owned by IHG, though a 25 year franchise contract. In 2013, Leading Hospitality paid a €363,754 fee to IHG.

Original story: Expansión (by Yovanna Blanco)

Translation: Carmel Drake