From left: The Shoreham Hotel, the Franklin Hotel and the Mansfield hotel

Ark Investment Partners’ Willow Hotels portfolio, which includes three Manhattan properties, has hit the block after hungry investors convinced the company to explore a sale, according to Crain’s. Willow’s Shoreham Hotel, at 33 West 55th Street, the Mansfield hotel, at 12 West 44th Street, and the Franklin Hotel, at 164 East 87th Street, contain a total of nearly 350 rooms. Also included in the five-property portfolio are the Hilton Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. and a hotel in Quebec City. CB Richard Ellis’ William Shanahan, Bradley Burwell and Ron Danko have been tapped to help Willow sell, recapitalize or find joint venture partners for the properties. [more]

From the February issue: A year and a half ago, the New York City hotel industry was hurting badly, as tourists cut back on spending and business travelers stopped calling to book rooms.

But times have changed. Indeed, the industry, while not back to where it was at the market’s peak, has done a 180 and is now rebounding stronger and faster than most had expected.

This month, The Real Deal talked to hotel experts not only about the key metrics for evaluating hotel performance, but also about development, hotel sales and a host of other crucial industry markers. [more]

From the October issue: Keeping heads in beds has not been easy for New York City’s hotel
industry in this economy. Not only are tourists cutting back on
expenses, but companies — including those that not too long ago
readily put up their employees at five-star hotels — are also
massively scaling back.
In this month’s Q & A, hotel experts and operators talked to The Real Deal about why the hospitality industry has fallen further here than it has nationally.
They said revenue per room, or RevPAR, is down between 20 and 30
percent and that the luxury hotel market (not surprisingly) is getting
crushed hardest.

From the August issue: In Stanley Kubrick’s cult classic film “The Shining,” a once-luxurious
hotel paradise turns out to be a house of horrors that’s nearly
impossible to escape. Right now, it seems that New York’s hotel investment sector is
having its Shining Moment. The hundred or so hotels developed during
the last few years are beset by murderous debt levels, credit markets
that prevent easy escape via refinancing and the specter of
Depression-like economic troubles.
“For the first half of the year, people were hoping we would
recover, or they could work out deals with the lenders,” said Bradley
Burwell, a senior associate in CBRE’s Capital Markets Group for hotels.
“May killed that hope, and June was not much better — and it’s finally
gotten to the point where borrowers have run out of money.” [more]