Publications

Specialist business property adviser, Christie & Co has brought to the market a portfolio of eight hotels located across Europe, on behalf of leading European operator, Louvre Hotels Group.

The portfolio comprises eight assets situated in desirable locations throughout Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy, including key cities such as Berlin and Turin. With assets all located in proximity to a city centre or on a major motorway route and operating under a mix of the Louvre Hotels’ brands, the hotels allow for easy access to major leisure and corporate demand generators. 

Additionally, most of the sites offer meeting spaces and on-site food & beverage facilities, providing multiple income streams and opening up further development potential.

Anna Friedrich, Associate Director at Christie & Co comments, “Bringing these eight hotels to the market is an exciting venture for us, leveraging our pan-European Brokerage team. We look forward to engaging with potential buyers in Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK to find the right new owners for these sites on behalf of Louvre Hotels Group.

“Due to their locations, size and potential, we anticipate strong interest from regional operators in the respective hotels’ countries but also from the wider European market, as these sites would be a fantastic addition to a growing portfolio.”

The freehold and long leasehold of the hotels are available subject to franchise agreements, apart from the two assets in Germany, which are offered on an operational lease basis. Christie & Co is inviting offers on a group, subgroup or individual basis. 

For further information on all the sites, please contact Anna Friedrich on Anna.Friedrich@christie.com or +44 20 7227 0726.

Specialist business property adviser, Christie & Co has published an annual report “French Hotel Market: Most Competitive Cities” and offers an insight into six of the country’s major urban destinations outside of Paris in 2018.

The report highlights a positive year for tourism with all six cities achieving higher levels of arrivals than in previous years, particularly amongst international visitors.

Conducting analysis of Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lille, Nice and Nantes, the report considers their KPIs including ADR, RevPAR, occupancy levels and hotel supply and what impacts these performances. Accessibility, tourist attractions, business and corporate activity, accessibility, and development in each city are explored as the indicators for positive growth and further opportunities. 

Whilst Nice leads the pack in ADR and RevPAR, with €127 and €90 respectively, Bordeaux shows the strongest occupancy rate of all the cities with 76%, and all but Marseille achieved above the national average of 69%. In 2018, all of the cities showed RevPAR increases on the previous year, apart from Lyon which remained flat, and in France overall it grew an encouraging 7.3%.

The report highlights that France is in a period of growth, recovering from a dip in the market in 2015/16 following security issues, with the 2018 KPIs reflecting this.

Soazig Drais, Associate Director – Consultancy at Christie & Co’s Paris office, who headed up the report, comments, “Several factors contribute to rising developers’ & investors’ interest in secondary markets. Not only are they undergoing urban regeneration (including improved connectivity), but the diversification of their hotel supply increases their attractivity toward international visitors, setting a positive outlook for 2019." 
 

International hotel property adviser, Christie & Co, has released its new analysis of hotel investment in 2018, which shows a new record year in investment in the sector in Spain with €4,860 million.

Following the report preview on January 24th at FITUR, the international tourism fair in Madrid, and in collaboration with the Asociación Empresarial Hotelera de Madrid, Christie & Co has now published the full report, in which it offers the global figure of hotel investment estimated in 2018 in Spain. and the report also provides the ‘Perspectives 2019-2020’, which predicts that Spain will continue to attract investment interest in a more volatile and competitive environment.

According to the data available to Christie & Co, the total hotel investment in Spain in 2018 was €4,860 million, in a total 223 transactions (surpassing the 185 transactions registered in 2017), which represents an average price per room of €128,000 and an increase of 24.6% of the total volume of investment versus 2017. This positions Spain in second place, behind the United Kingdom (where investment is estimated to be £6,500 million), but before Germany for the first time (where €4,000 million has been estimated for the total investment in 2018).

In terms of investor profile, the report highlights the importance of investment firms as the largest source of capital in 2018, representing 53% of the total investment, with more than €2,560 million (increasing its percentage versus 2017, in which they represented 42%). Hotel companies, with 24% of the total investment figures (vs. 20% in 2017) are in second place, and REIT companies are again in third position with 15% (vs. 16% in 2017). Furthermore, regarding origin, it is noted that investment from national origin has decreased in comparison to the previous year (35% in 2018 vs. 51% in 2017), surpassed by the increase of US investors (40% in 2018 vs 23% in 2017) and the entrance of new investors from Thailand (8%) and México (4%).

The report also emphasizes how the estimated investment figures have been greatly increased by portfolio transactions and significant assets, which represented more than 60% of the investment volume in the whole country. Blackstone, which was the main player in 2017 with the purchase of the HI Partners portfolio (€630 million), has been the main protagonist in 2018 with the purchase of 48 hotels from the Hispania REIT portfolio, for €1,900 million. Likewise, transactions like the purchase of the Atom Hoteles portfolio, the joining of the Chinese group Gaw Capital and the increase of the participation of Omega Capital in Hospes hotel chain, the nine urban hotels Silken portfolio acquired by CBRE Global Investment Partners and Pygmalion Capital Advisers LLP, the takeover of NH Hotel Group by Minor International, and the purchase of Hotel Villa Magna by the Mexican REIT RLH Properties for €210 million (with a record price per room of €1.4 million) caused the total volume transacted in Spain in 2018 to once again beat all previous records.

Christie & Co, as in the report "Hotel Investment Overview - Spain 2017" published in February 2018, highlights again the interest aroused by secondary destinations, generating 23% of the total investment, with a 65% increase in comparison to 2017 (in which investment in secondary locations was 14% of the total investment volume). This percentage reflects that three out of ten rooms that changed ownership were not located in the main Spanish urban or holiday destinations.

With regards to the investment volume in primary locations (over €3,700 million), resort destinations continue to outstrip urban destinations as they did in 2017 (64% of investment in resort destinations compared to 36% in urban destinations). In 2018, investment both in the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands represented more than 50% of the total volume (vs. 40% in 2017), causing a slight decline in urban destinations whose investment continues to be led by Madrid (12% of total investment in 2018 vs. 16% in 2017), followed by Sevilla (which enters the podium with 4.5%) which surpassed Barcelona (3.5% in 2018 vs. 9% in 2017), and Malaga (which in 2018 dropped to 2.9% vs. 4% in 2017).

Finally, the analysis shows how almost 93% of transactions carried out in 2018 (vs. 90% in 2017) were concentrated again in the same six Spanish regions than in the previous year: the Canary Islands (29.6%), the Balearic Islands (21%), Andalusia (16.5%), Community of Madrid (12.9%), Catalonia (6.8%) and the Valencian Community (6.3%). Regarding the average price per room per region, the Canary Islands led the ranking in the resort market, with €140,000 per room, while the Community of Madrid led in the case of urban destinations with an average price over €200,000 per room.

Inmaculada Ranera, Managing Director at Christie & Co Spain & Portugal, comments “The Spanish hotel industry continues to prove its resilience to the economic and political uncertainties that drive the global agenda and, despite noticing the effects of the recovery of Mediterranean resort destinations, the main coastal destinations in Spain maintain stable KPIs (occupancy, ADR and RevPAR). Urban destinations have proven to be solid markets resisting uncertainty related to security issues. Therefore, it is not surprising that the positive evolution of a sector which remains key for Spanish economy and continues to attract investment appetite, especially from foreign investors.”

Christie & Co publishes special report on Chinese cultural & tourism village and theme park market

Following the success of the second annual ‘Cultural & Tourism Village’ session at the 12th China Tourism Forum in November 2018, co-hosted with the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), specialist business property adviser, Christie & Co has published a special report, ‘Cultural & Tourism Villages and Theme Parks,’ with support from the SHTM Hotel and Tourism Research Center and the guests at the first annual ‘Cultural & Tourism Village’ session in 2017.
Christie & Co’s report analyses the global theme park market, top theme park groups and the development of cultural & tourism villages in China. As the Chinese tourism market continues to boom, fuelled by increasing household incomes and the support of central and local governments, the report identifies the emerging concept of cultural & tourism villages as an investment hotspot within the Chinese tourism market.

The report considers the scale of the global theme park market, in terms of both visitor numbers and total revenue, finding that while the North American market remains the largest, the Asian Pacific market is the fastest growing region, with a compound annual growth rate of 7% in the Asian Pacific from 2011 to 2016. The North American and Asian Pacific markets are expected to dominate the global market in the future, accounting for an estimated 85% of the market by 2020.

Following analysis of the top 10 theme park markets, the report identifies the top three as the United States, Japan and China. The Chinese market has positioned itself as the third largest theme park market, growing at a compound annual rate of 16.8% from 2011 to 2016. The country's proportion of the global income was around 11% in 2016 and is expected to reach 14% in 2020.

Global theme park groups currently leverage ‘intellectual property’ (IP) to create experiential entertainment to differentiate themselves and attract more visitors, and destination theme parks construct a strong ‘theme IP’ in order to increase the popularity of the park, generate income and influence longer overnight stays. In terms of global branded theme parks, Disney is positioned as the market leader, accounting for approximately 30% of global consumption with 12% of global attendance in 2016. Top global theme park brands, namely Disney, Merlin’s Legoland, Universal Studios and Six Flags, have already entered the Chinese market due to its increasingly high demand for new theme parks.

According to National Bureau of Statistics of China, the total number of tourists in 2017 exceeded 5 billion, marking an 85% increase from 2011 to 2017 and a compound annual growth over 10%. China’s theme park market grew rapidly from 2000 to 2014, accelerated by the emerging concept of cultural & tourism villages, first introduced by the Chinese Government in 2015 in order to accelerate the urbanisation of villages and foster faster industrial growth in rural areas. The Chinese theme park market is expected to continue to grow rapidly alongside the development and growth of cultural & tourism villages.

Joanne Jia, Head of Asia at Christie & Co comments, “Christie & Co is currently assisting a number of global theme park groups and IP owners to enter the growing Chinese tourism market, and we are seeing an increasing number of overseas groups looking to enter this exciting market. The advantages and risks of different strategies to entering the market and managing planning, construction, operation and management should be considered. Although many overseas groups have adopted a sino-foreign joint venture strategy with a Chinese group or government, the lease agreement, management contract and franchise models can still prove to be advantageous. Most importantly, intellectual property will remain a key catalyst to the success of theme parks and cultural & tourism villages and remains an essential component for investors and operators.”

The report, ‘Business Outlook 2019: Navigate, Innovate, Accelerate,’ reflects on the themes, activity and challenges of the previous year and forecasts what 2019 might bring across the industries in which Christie & Co operates, including healthcare, hospitality and retail. Overall, whilst headwinds affect the majority of these sectors, predominantly increasing operating costs and recruitment, growth was still seen by many businesses.  

While international investment continues to thrive and the impending Brexit deadline likely to bring economic clarity, the future of business looks to be bright, according to the latest annual report by specialist business property adviser, Christie & Co.

The report, ‘Business Outlook 2019: Navigate, Innovate, Accelerate,’ reflects on the themes, activity and challenges of the previous year and forecasts what 2019 might bring across the industries in which Christie & Co operates, including healthcare, hospitality and retail. Overall, whilst headwinds affect the majority of these sectors, predominantly increasing operating costs and recruitment, growth was still seen by many businesses.  

A shift in investor appetite in the commercial property market has seen greater demand for ‘alternatives’ property, fuelled by Asian and European investors keen to capitalise on developments in the healthcare, childcare and hospitality sectors. 

Brexit is identified as a pivotal factor for many businesses in the UK, with some having benefitted from the relatively low value of the pound and others feeling the pressure of an uncertain outcome. Generally, an upturn in confidence is expected with the clarity 2019 should bring. Additionally, more alternative lenders are coming to the fore, as traditional banks are more cautious to lend, creating greater opportunity for business owners looking to embark on their first venture or expand. 

Within the report, the key strategies which business owners and operators may employ to navigate challenges throughout 2019 are identified as: ensuring staff retention, minimising costs through new innovation and better operational management, and reinvestment. These approaches are found to be applicable to a range of sectors, giving businesses of all sizes an edge to adapt and thrive in 2019. 

Average prices remained economically positive throughout 2018 across almost every sector in which Christie & Co specialises. These are as follows: 

Dental: + 5.2%
Pharmacy: + 2.8%
Care: + 3.1%
Childcare: + 8%
Retail: + 1.3%
Pubs: + 2.7%
Restaurants: - 1.3%
Hotels: + 4%

Chris Day, Global Managing Director at Christie & Co, comments, “There is no doubt that the past year has been a struggle for some businesses in the UK, particularly on the high street and casual dining operations, however there has also been plenty to be optimistic about. Consumer demand across many sectors grows, particularly those with exciting concepts or which are successfully utilising new technologies, whilst investment from overseas has seen a healthy continuation which doesn’t look set to slow. With ever changing political and consumer landscapes, being aware and prepared to adapt will help business flourish this year.”