Hotel Lawyer with the latest pulse of the hotel industry from The Lodging Conference at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix Arixona
The title of this blog says it all. This is the time and place to be - The Lodging Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. We called it at Meet the Money® in May, 2010, but the tide that started turning at the end of the first quarter 2010 has continued its flow and it seems to be unmistakable now. I expect to hear some very exciting things at the Conference here in the next few days.
I would describe the mood of the pre-conference gathering that started this evening as very "EXPECTANT." Expecting more and better in both transactions . . . and eventually . . . perhaps more slowly . . . better in the fundamentals of the hotel industry.
Our anecdotal sense of this from our legal and advisory practice is confirmed by more detailed statistics. Alan Reay of Atlas Hospitality reports that hotel transactions in California are up by more than 50% in the first 6 months of 2010. Alan has not told us this, but I have to believe that most of that growth was in the 2nd quarter, so it bodes very well for the second half of the year.
This theme seems to repeated everywhere. More deals are getting done. People are getting more comfortable with values. Lenders are foreclosing on more properties or selling the notes or properties. Buyers are stepping up. No one seems to be finding the big discounted values, but sophisticated buyers of notes and properties are closing deals.
What does it all mean? Well, you have to be here to get it first hand, but we will try to give you a sense of what is going in the coming articles.
Stay tuned. Morris Lasky and Harry Javer say conference attendance is up at least 20% this year over last year. And conference attnedance is usually an indicator of industry trends. The tone of the conference is more upbeat than I have seen in more than 2 years. Nobody is getting rich, but transactions seem to be happening and hotels are continuing their slow recovery.
That means there is money to be made for those who have a jump on leads, insights, capital, and positioning. This could be interesting!
Jim Butler
+1 310 201 3526
JMBM