The award-winning Abigail’s Hotel in Victoria’s Humboldt Valley has been taken over by a White Rock company.
The hotel sold on June 1, said Randy Holt, DTZ Victoria vice-president, who represented the seller. The selling price was not released, but former owner Ellen Cmolik had put the property on the market for $5.19 million in January.
Cmolik had owned the 23-room luxury boutique hotel for 12 years. Shuhua Pei, principal of the numbered company that bought the hotel, could not be reached for comment July 7.
Nick Saklas, Cmolik’s son and hotel general manager for the past five years, said in a statement that the ownership transition has gone smoothly and existing staff are remaining.
“It is very much business as usual at Abigail’s,” said Saklas, who will move on after the transition.
Located at 906 McClure St., the elegant hotel has won national and international awards and recognition. TripAdvisor.com has named it the most romantic hotel in Canada two years running.
Abigail’s was established in 1985 as a 16-room bed and breakfast. Bill McKechnie created the hotel from a faded 1930s-era apartment building, then called The Bessborough. The original building is 10,797 square feet and holds 17 rooms. The adjacent Coach House building with six suites is 4,458 square feet.
Dan Behune, who developed and later sold the Brentwood Bay Resort and Spa, subsequently bought Abigail’s, spending about $1 million in the late 1990s to create the additional suites in the Coach House in an expansion and upgrading project.
When Cmolik purchased the hotel in 2003, additional renovations were carried out, including a $120,000 bathroom refit featuring marble from India, limestone from British Columbia and German-made clawfoot soaker tubs.
Abigail’s is the latest local hotel to go to a new owner in multimillion-dollar deals.
Last month, Vancouver’s Aragon Properties purchased the 106-year-old English Inn and adjacent development properties in Esquimalt. The sale price was not released. The two sites had been listed jointly for $8.55 million.
An Aragon official said the plan is to operate and enhance the hotel, which has received $4.5 million in upgrading in the past 10 years.
In spring of this year, the Pettinger family sold its Pacific Sands Beach Resort in Tofino to Vancouver’s Gordon Nelson Inc., also owner of the nearby Ocean Village Resort. No sale price was revealed but it had been listed at $29.3 million through DTZ Victoria.
In summer of last year, Vancouver developer and philanthropist Nat Bosa and his wife Flora purchased the 107-year-old Fairmont Empress Hotel. They have already started extensive renovations to the downtown landmark.
Colliers International’s 2015 Canadian Hotel Investment Report said the country’s lodging industry has moved into a consistent $1-billion-plus market annually.
Increased interest in buying hotel assets shown by a diverse group of purchasers is a major factor in this performance, Colliers’ report said.
“Domestic institutional capital players have become progressively more aggressive as they increase their allocation for higher-yielding real estate,” the report said.
Foreign institutional capital is also investing in Canada’s hotel sector, in particular Chinese groups, it said. In 2013, a Chinese group purchased the Brentwood Bay Resort for $13.99 million.
