The recovery room
Hotels on fast track to health: CBRE
If you’ve noticed the large crowds coming and going from the new Hard Rock hotel on West 48th Street and the new Riu on West 47th, you might wonder: What happened to the hotel-industry crash we keep hearing about?
In fact, the city’s pandemic-ravaged hotel scene is going to be just fine — and a lot sooner than many analysts have said, according to an eye-opening study by CBRE, the commercial real estate services and investment firm.
“The hotel sector has begun to rebound and is poised to return to pre-pandemic levels in both occupancy and ADR [average daily room rates] by 2024,” said Dan Hanrahan, senior vice president of CBRE Hotels Advisory covering the Northeast.
The brokerage foresees strong hotel performance this year and beyond based on first-quarter 2022 results. It projects a nearly 30% jump in ADR and annual occupancy rising to 77.2% next year and 82% by 2024.
CBRE also predicted that a key metric of hotel performance — revenue per available room, or RevPAR — will rise by 75% this year over last.
But wait, didn’t Crain’s report hotel occupancy at only 56% in February? Didn’t this newspaper recently report gloomy tidings from the American Hotel & Lodging Association and Kalibri Labs, which said business-travel hotel and tourism revenue in the Big Apple this year would be 55% lower than in 2019?
Well, projections often disagree. But we’ll put our money on CBRE’s cheerier forecast. Why? For one thing, CBRE’s findings are based on the first months of 2022, which are typically slow months
— not on last year or the year before. And the “tourism” industry cited by the Hotel & Lodging Association includes many more kinds of businesses than hotels.
So maybe the new Ritz-Carlton Nomad, Virgin and several other fancy inns opening later this year aren’t in as much of a pickle as doomsayers have claimed.
Essex Crossing funded
The team behind Essex Crossing has a lot to crow about.
On the culinary pride side, chef Chintan Pandya of red-hot Indian eatery Dhamaka in the complex’s Essex Market was just named “Best New York State Chef” as part of the James Beard Foundation’s 2022 annual awards.
On the more critical bottom-line front, developers Delancey Street Associates have nailed down $466 million in refinancing for four buildings in the $1.6 billion, 2 million-square-foot complex. The team is comprised of Taconic
Partners, L+M Development Partners, the Prusik Group and Goldman Sachs’ Urban Investment Group.
The largest loan, $285 million from Deutsche Bank, replaces construction loans at 145 and 155 Delancey streets. The other loans are $144 million for The Artisan and $37.1 million from Square Mile Capital for One Essex Crossing.
Charles Bendit, coCEO of Taconic Partners, said the Deutsche loan provides capital to complete the leasing program for the remaining office space as well as for some space in the Market Line, the underground food and retail section of the project.
The Delancey Street office towers comprise 350,000 square feet of which 175,000 square feet are leased to Verizon. The architecturally praised complex near the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge is also home to Trader Joe’s, the International Center of Photography and a 14-screen Regal Cinemas.
UES bakery upgrades
Two Little Red Hens crossed the road — but it took the popular Upper East Side bakery two years to make the trip.
The cupcakes-andpastries mecca on upper Second Avenue was forced to close during the pandemic. The owner searched high and low for a new location with the aid of indefatigable broker Stacey Kelz of Stacey-Robins Realty.
They found a new home at last right across the street at 1641 Second Ave. at East 85th Street. The bakery will have 1,800 square feet of corner ground-floor space. Newmark’s Jason Pruger and Adam Weinblatt repped building owner Maxx Properties. The asking rent was $205 per square foot.