AWH Partners is continuing its solid growth, with the real estate investment, development, and management firm acquiring its fifth hotel in 12 months.
Revealed at the 2022 Americas Lodging Investment Summit (ALIS) in Los Angeles this week (Jan 24), AWH Partners have acquired the Kimpton Goodland Goleta, a 158-room hotel near Santa Barbara, California.
The latest acquisition over the last year takes AWH’s tally over US$240 million in purchase prices, with over US$100 million of total equity invested and US$30 million in renovations planned.
“AWH is thrilled to diversify our expanding portfolio of attractive hotel properties and deepen our exposure to high-growth West Coast markets with the addition of the Goodland Goleta hotel, another asset acquired at an extremely attractive basis we would never have been able to achieve pre-pandemic,” said AWH Partners Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Russell Flicker.
“With minimal new supply, a general lack of available sites and costly land prices, the Santa Barbara market has high barriers to entry, and we are pleased to have found this attractive opportunity, which was never offered to the public on the same terms.
“We look forward to renovating the lifestyle hotel and welcoming guests to this highly accessible leisure destination.”
AWH’s other recent acquisitions have included Villa Florence Hotel in San Francisco, a 189-room independent hotel and more than 10,000 square feet of retail; the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Anaheim in Orange County, a 461-room property located adjacent to the UCI Medical Center and in close proximity to Angel Stadium, Disneyland, and the Anaheim Convention Center; the Hilton Garden Inn, Fremont Milpitas, a 145-room, high-quality, 2021-vintage property adjacent to Tesla’s flagship Silicon Valley factory; and Hilton Garden Inn, Portland/Lake Oswego, a 179-room hotel located in an affluent Portland suburb.
“Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we made an intense effort to stabilise our portfolio so that we could focus our attention on what we do best – investing in complicated, distressed and unique hospitality assets,” said AWH Partners Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Chad Cooley.
“We made a substantial financial commitment to keep our leadership team together and incentivised, and we poured resources into technology and data to super-charge our acquisition efforts in 2021.
“Looking back, our investment activity speaks for itself, and we are thrilled with how we are positioned heading into 2022,” he said.
AWH Partners Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Jon Rosenfeld, added: “AWH was formed amid the global financial crisis, with much of our initial portfolio acquired out of severe distress.
“As we continue to navigate the economic challenges brought on by the pandemic, we are in a unique position to leverage our deep experience across market cycles to continue identifying, executing and creating value for attractive investment opportunities in the U.S. lodging space as the industry rebounds and demand across channels accelerates.
“While many anticipated a quick deluge of opportunities to materialize early in the pandemic, we now know there will be interesting pockets of opportunities for at least the next 24 months in our space,” he said.
With the latest acquisitions, AWH Partners now has over 9,500 hotel rooms across 35 hotels, representing billions of total real estate value.