Author of www.HotelLawBlog.com
28 January 2007
Hotel Lawyer on hotel finance. History is being made. The biggest leveraged buy out ever keeps getting bigger. Sam Zell has orchestrated an auction for his Equity Office Properties. And the latest bid from the Blackstone Group is $54 per share, bringing the deal value to $38.3 billion and topping the prior bid from Vornado.
At the same time, one of the biggest hotel deals in history — perhaps small change compared to the Equity Office Properties deal but very significant in its own way — has been announced with the $6.6 billion acquisition of CNL Hotels & Resorts by Morgan Stanley and the contemporaneous spin off of $2.4 billion of hotel assets to Ashford Hospitality Trust Inc.
How could these two transactions affect the lodging world, and what is the impact beyond the immediate transactions themselves?