Leon Charney and the hotel site at 120 West 41st Street

Billionaire Leon Charney, has sold a development site at 120 West 41st Street to Stanford Hotels, a source close to the deal told The Real Deal.

Stanford, which operates Hilton, Marriott and Sheraton hotels all over the country, paid $19.5 million for the property in a deal that closed late Thursday, the source said. The company is said to be planning a 125-room hotel on the site, assembling air rights from a nearby theater. The acquisition is Stanford’s first foray into the New York market.

Charney, a real estate developer who was once President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy adviser, had been planning a 22-story, $90 million boutique hotel at the site under an agreement with Minnesota-based Graves Hospitality. [more]

From left: Robert Toshi Chan and the Flatiron Hotel and Carlos Couturier,
CEO of Grupo Habita, which owns the Hotel Americano

Management companies, private equity firms and hedge funds are building hotels at a rate unimaginable during the recession, and they’re not wasting any time building them. While some new hotels construction may continue into 2012, more than half of the new hotels slated to be completed in New York in 2011 have already opened their doors, Hotel Chatter reported.

The most recent additions to the newly opened list include Robert “Toshi” Chan’s Flatiron Hotel at 1141 Broadway, which, after much back and forth between Chan and creditor Long Island bank, finally opened in late August; the Enrique Norton-designed Hotel Americano at 518 West 27th Street, which opened in September after multiple delays; and the Nolitan, at 30 Kenmare Street, which opened in July after being delayed nine times. [more]

The Blackstone Group is planning a “no expense spared” renovation of the legendary Waldorf-Astoria hotel, with interiors by famed designer Alexandra Champlimaud, according to the Post. Champalimaud is known for her work at the Pierre, the St. Regis in Beijing and the penthouses at London’s the Dorchester. Architecture firm Brennan Beer Gorman is also rumored to have a hand in the project, which is likely to cost “hundreds of millions of dollars.” The hotel currently has three restaurants, including the Bull and Bear Steakhouse. They’re all slated to get upgrades, but as of now, aren’t expected to be joined by any new eateries. Blackstone purchased the Waldorf in 2007 as part of its $26 billion deal to buy the Hilton Hotels chain. [Post, 1st item] 

Hospitality giant Hilton is looking at several locations in Manhattan where it would open its first Homewood Suites hotel, which is part of its extended-stay concept, company executive Thomas Lorenzo told The Real Deal.

The move is made in response to other hoteliers expanding in the market, such as Marriott International which has a long-established Residence Inn by Marriott in Midtown at 1033 Sixth Avenue but is slated to open another at the now under development 1717 Broadway at 54th Street, Lorenzo said.

“We want to get one approved [by Hilton] this year,” Lorenzo told The Real Deal in Las Vegas last week at the annual global retail real estate show RECon, hosted by the International Council on Shopping Centers.  [more]

Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson’s development company has picked up its third New York City hotel in three years with the purchase of the Doubletree Metropolitan Hotel in Midtown for $335 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. The 755-room, Morris Lapidus-designed property, originally built as the Summit hotel by the Tisch family in 1961, last traded for $110.5 million in 2003. The seller group, which consists of Highgate Holdings, Goldman Sachs’ Whitehall Real Estate Funds and Rockwood Capital, had put $35 million into renovations since then. [more]

From left: CBRE’s Ron Danko and two hotels in the deal: a Branchburg Residence Inn and a Long Island Spring Hill Suites

[Updated 12:39 p.m.] MCR Development has acquired a portfolio of 10 Marriott and Hilton hotels for $164 million, marking one of the largest hotel deals in the country so far this year, according to commercial real estate services firm CB Richard Ellis, which brokered the deal. The collection of mostly extended-stay hotels includes 1,100 rooms across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

The seller, developer Briad Group, held onto the portfolio longer than it intended, according to CBRE broker Ron Danko, who was involved in the deal. Briad, who built the hotels between 2007 and 2010, chose to ride out the recession before unloading the properties. [more]

From left: 337-343 West 39th Street, 320 Pearl Street

From the April issue: “I guess you’re big boys now,” one Wall Street analyst quipped during a recent conference call with Hersha Hospitality Trust honchos Jay and Neil Shah.

Indeed, the brothers have become “big boys” on the country’s biggest stage as they’ve ramped up their company’s focus on New York City hotels.

After taking their family’s modest Harrisburg, Pa., business public in 1999 and expanding it under multiple monikers (Hiltons, Hamptons, Holiday Inns) throughout the Northeast suburbs, the Shah brothers are now betting most heavily on the Big Apple.

Following February’s $164.5 million purchase of three hotels from developer Sam Chang in Times Square, which Hersha financed through the sale of more than 51 million shares of stock, New York now accounts for 27 percent of the decade-old, Philadelphia-based real estate investment trust’s geographic footprint.

The Real Deal had a contingent of reporters and editors at the New York Hilton for the Real Estate Board of New York’s annual banquet and awards ceremony (click here to see an article on the event). The Real Deal’s Web editor Lauren Elkies interviewed a slew of real estate bigwigs from Bill Rudin of Rudin Management — who said Jonathan Mechanic of Fried, Frank (who The Real Deal also spoke to) is “the real deal” — to Bruce Mosler of Cushman & Wakefield — who said he loves The Real Deal, to Frederick Peters of Warburg Realty — who said “Virtual Office Web sites,” or VOWS, “will ultimately be insignificant.” [more]

Speaker Christine Quinn (center) will push harder to redevelop Farley
Post Office (left) to replace Penn Station which she compared
unfavorably to Union Station in D.C. (right)

City Council speaker Christine Quinn told contractors and builders at a
morning breakfast today that the Moynihan Station planners need to
consider smaller or staggered plans, despite the fact that Pennsylvania
Station is an eyesore. “At this point we need to come up with a plan even if it is smaller or
phased in,” for the project located in her city council district, she
said. Quinn was speaking to members of the New York Building Congress at its
industry breakfast forum at the Hilton New York Hotel in Midtown today. The Moynihan Station plan envisions converting the James A. Farley Post
Office on Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street to a rail transit hub, part of
a wider vision to transform the Penn Station area, with a new Madison
Square Garden structure and office towers. [more]