In a fresh indication of the industry’s demise following the coronavirus pandemic, sales activity for hotels in the Bay Area and California as a whole collapsed during the first half of 2023.
In the first half of this year, the number of hotels sold in the Bay Area and the entire state fell at a rate reminiscent of the steep decline the California hospitality industry experienced following the recessions of 2008 and 2009.
According to Alan Reay, president of Irvine-based Atlas Hospitality Group, which monitors the California hotel market, “we have never seen anything like this, nothing this bad.” Reay would be aware. For more than 20 years, Atlas Hospitality has been researching the state’s lodging market.
According to data from Atlas Hospitality Group, the number of hotels sold in California during the first half of 2023 fell by 52.9% when compared to the same period in 2022. The final year of the previous recession, 2009, saw a 51% decline in hotel revenues in California.
The tweet below verifies the news:
Bay Area, California hotel sales implode as investors flee sector https://t.co/2U2O0PfcdE
— Mercury News (@mercnews) August 15, 2023
According to Atlas Hospitality, the number of hotels sold in both Northern and Southern California dropped significantly. Individual hotel sales in Northern California fell by 44.6%; specifically, 62 hotels were sold there in the first half of 2023 as opposed to 112 in the same period the previous year.
In Southern California, the number of hotels sold fell by 58.9%. In comparison to 151 hotels sold in the first half of 2022, a projected 62 hotels were sold in the region in the first six months of 2023. The purchase of the 276-room Claremont Hotel in the Oakland-Berkeley region for $163.3 million became the largest hotel transaction in Alameda County for the first half of 2023.
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The purchase of the Springtown Inn in Livermore, which has 125 rooms, was the other Alameda County hotel transaction – two hotels were sold during the six-month period in that county. The selling of the 89-room Arena Hotel in downtown San Jose for $22.9 million was the largest hotel transaction in Santa Clara County during the first half of this year.
The 51-room Comfort Suites San Jose Airport in North San Jose was sold for $1 million in the other Santa Clara County transaction. Some of the biggest sales were the purchase of hotels that the lender had taken back following a mortgage foreclosure, which is another evidence of instability for California hotels.
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