Articles Posted in Outlook and Trends

Published on:

01 June 2011

Debt is returning, equity is out looking, and we’ve passed the bottom of the trough. Why now is the time to purchase a hotel.

We promised to let you know when Hotel Business® published its coverage of its 2011 Executive Roundtable–Capital Ideas: Financing Solutions For Opportunistic Dealmakers that took place on May 2, 2011 in Los Angeles prior to Meet the Money®. The current issue of Hotel Business® just hit my mail box and the articles covering the Executive Roundtable and Meet the Money® provide some thoughtful reading.

If you do not know why now is the time to invest in a hotel, you will want to read these articles!

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Published on:

17 May 2011

Hospitality Lawyers on the State of the Hotel Industry.

Mark Woodworth of PKF is one of my favorite industry experts when it comes to getting meaningful information and helpful forecasts. He lived up the highest expectations at JMBM’s recent Meet the Money® conference.

Here is his slide presentation where Mark addressed a lot of critical questions we all want the answers for, including:

  • Where are we in the hotel cycle?
  • What’s happening with corporate profits, job growth and lodging demand?
  • What’s the effect of the housing problem?
  • What is the forecast? (Good and getting better)
  • What’s the impact of oil prices on lodging demand?

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Published on:

16 May 2011

Hotel Lawyers’ updates on capital and debt markets for hotels, transaction sales data and financings

David Loeb from RW Baird always provides such interesting hotel data. In his excellent presentation at Meet the Money®, he gave us the latest industry data showing:

  • How REITs have dominated the transaction market (more than 80% of the transactions year-to-date in 2011)
  • What’s happening in the debt markets now with yields going below 9%
  • How hotel stock investments have fared compared to other investments
  • What is happening with IPOs and IPO pipeline

And when you are studying his presentation slides, don’t stop at what looks like the end, because he has great stuff in his “Appendix: Transaction Tables.” As David said, think of this this as a “free bonus” with detailed information on:

  • Selected hotel sales data
  • Loan details on originations and refinancings
  • Equity raises

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Published on:

10 May 2011

Hotel Lawyer with nuggets from JMBM’s Meet the Money® 2011

For all of our industry friends — whether or not you were able to attend Meet the Money® 2011 in Los Angeles last week — we will be posting on the Hotel Law Blog some of the invaluable information delivered by industry thought leaders at the conference. In the coming days and weeks, look for PowerPoint presentations, summaries of panel discussions and, of course, commentary. But today, we will whet your appetite with some sound bites — nuggets of insight, analysis and humor — from some of the best minds in the industry.

  • Who is financing?
  • When do we hit the peak?
  • Are market values running ahead of fundamentals?
  • How do you price deals today?

These are some of the questions that continued to surface through various panel discussions and hallway conversations during the conference. For some pertinent nuggets, read on.

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Published on:

5 May 2011

Hotel Lawyer from Meet the Money® – Hotel industry think tank’s top 10 challenges for 2011
I am privileged to be one of the co-chairs of the Lodging Industry Investment Council (LIIC) along with Mike Cahill and Sean Hennessey. LIIC is the hotel industry “think tank” whose membership owns or operates many billions of hotel investments, and involves all aspects of the industry.

LIIC surveys its membership each year and first releases the results — The LIIC Top 10 — at JMBM’s annual Meet the Money® conference. Mike Cahill, president and founder of HREC – Hospitality Real Estate Counselors (www.hrec.com) compiled the survey and delivered its results to the 350 participants at the conference.

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Published on:

31 March 2011

Debt and equity financing for hotels is back! Hotel transactions are rolling again!

And the Global Hospitality Group® of Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP (JMBM) has announced the 2011 Meet the Money® hotel finance conference to explore the latest opportunities in the capital stack with “Bridging the Gap and Facilitating the Flow of Capital.”

We hope you can join us May 2-4, 2011, at the Sheraton Gateway in Los Angeles for this important conference. Here is how to get all the information on time, place, program, speakers, and registration information. It is time to sign up now.

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Published on:

31 January 2011

Hotel Lawyer on the state of the hotel industry. At the ALIS conference last week, Smith Travel gave a great overview on the final results for 2010 as well as its outlook for 2011 and 2012. The numbers are very interesting!

Jan Freitag made the presentation at the ALIS conference. According to him, at the end of 2010, there were 52,000 hotels in the United States providing a total room supply of 1.7 billion rooms (a 2% increase in supply over 2009).

Great increase in demand. The demand for room nights grew a staggering 7.8% returning to the pre-bubble peak of 1 billion room nights sold during 2010, but with an increased supply of hotel rooms taking a share of the demand, occupancy only increased 5.7% to 57.6%, below the magic 60% occupancy level. Smith Travel hailed the demand growth, but noted that it does not expect to see this outsized growth again in the foreseeable future. In fact, as noted below, demand growth for the next two years is projected to be below 2% per year.

Disappointing lack of any meaningful rate growth. Unfortunately, the dramatic demand growth was not accompanied by a comparable increase in the average daily rate or ADR. In 2010, ADR was flat (actually down -0.1%) at $98, and still below the important $100 level. RevPAR increased 5.5% to $56.50 and room revenues increased 7.6% to $99.5 billion.

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Published on:

27 January 2011

Hotel Lawyer with the pulse of the hotel industry from the ALIS conference in San Diego

After spending the past few days in San Diego at the Americas Lodging Industry Summit or ALIS conference, the hotel lawyers from JMBM’s Global Hospitality Group® have a pretty good sense of the “pulse” of the industry. Although attendance at the conference was down significantly from last year, as cost-cutting continues, the mood was decidedly more optimistic, and lots of people were actively working on deals or projects.

We thought the mood reflected a sense of “Great Expectations” – a relatively optimistic sense that the worst is clearly behind us, and that things will only get better from here, however slowly. Debt capital has reemerged for existing projects with established cash flows, and a decent project may get quite a few competitive bids. Property transactions are also happening across the spectrum. Foreign investment, particularly from China is fueling some of the acquisition activity. The REITs and equity buyers are also very active.

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Published on:

8 January 2011

Hotel Lawyer with advice for 2011: Hotel Investors, take note!

Like it or not, the stage is now set. This is the time. The year 2011 will present one of the greatest hotel buying opportunities for many years to come. And if you are not buying hotels this year, you will miss the window created by one of the biggest economic downturns in American history. What are the key indicators as to why this is a great time to by a hotel? And is price alone enough to justify the purchase, or are there other factors you need to think about? If the market is heading north, can you still make a bad purchase?

Hotel Lawyer Guy Maisnik, Vice Chairman of JMBM’s Global Hospitality Group®, who was the lead attorney for the Receiver in the recent sale of the Sheraton Universal Hotel, answers these questions and more.

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Published on:

5 January 2011

Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP (JMBM), one of California’s foremost full-service law firms, today announced that its Global Hospitality Group® facilitated the sale of the Sheraton Universal Hotel to Shenzhen New World Group Co. JMBM represented the receiver and structured the sale so that the 20-story, 451 room hotel could be conveyed while the hotel was in receivership.

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