Kimpton Hotels ready to mount buying spree

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

The hotel industry is in the doldrums, but that may give an aggressive San Francisco hotel the opportunity to expand by picking up distressed properties it couldn’t otherwise afford. Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants has almost $250 million in a fund it raised last year to snare discounted properties and is now close to a deal to buy 15 floors in a recently completed 82-story Chicago skyscraper called the Aqua.

Kimpton would buy its space for a new hotel for $56 million, Crain’s Chicago Business reported. Another hotel company agreed to pay more than $84 million three years ago, but walked away when the hospitality market took a hard turn for the worse.

Kimpton already owns 42 hotels in 19 cities, including the Palomar in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The company has identified more than 500 other hotels it might want to acquire, said investment banker Donald Wise of Johnson Capital. ‘Given the current lack of financing available for hotel development and Kimpton’s dry powder, the company is likely able to negotiate favorable terms for its investments,’ Wise said.

Roger Vincent