B.C.'s hotel market is putting other provinces in the doghouse with a nation-leading 117% increase in property sales last year.
It also has the highest “per-key” prices in the country, with an average sale price of $269,400 for each room, more than twice as high as second-place Alberta.
In 2015, B.C. posted a total hotel property sales volume of $759 million, up 31% from a year earlier.
Blockbuster Vancouver hotel transactions last year included the $180 million purchase of the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver and the $290 million sale of the Westin Bayshore, which pencilled out to $567,500 for each of its 511 rooms, according to a Colliers International report.
The Westin Bayshore deal is widely considered a land transaction because the hotel and its six-acre Coal Harbour site were bought by noted residential developer Concord Pacific.
Vancouver now officially has the highest per-key price ever for any market in Canada, according to Carrie Russell, managing director of North Vancouver-based HVS Canada, which tracks the hotel sector.
After the Bayshore transaction, the next priciest single-hotel sale in Canada last year lagged far behind.
That sale was the $186.5 million transaction that involved Ivanhoe Cambridge selling all but a 20% stake in Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel to Kingsett and InnVest REIT.
Kingsett took 60% of that hotel while InnVest bought 20%.
(Table: Colliers International)
With 1,363 suites, the per-room sale price in the Royal York hotel transaction was $137,000 – less than a quarter of the price for the rooms at the Bayshore.
The $758.7 million in hotel transactions in B.C. last year amounted to about 31% of total hotel transactions Canadawide. That was not far behind Ontario, which had 39% of the total sales volume.
The next priciest transactions for B.C. hotels last year were the Best Western Plus Downtown Vancouver, which sold for $38.5 million; the Edgewater Lodge, which sold for $16 million and the Comfort Inn & Suites Salmon Arm, which sold for $10 million.
The report noted that hotel values, based on operating performance, in Vancouver rose 21.3%. That was No. 1 in the country and it was substantially more than the 14.2% rise in value that greeted Toronto hotels.*
