New York City hotel transaction volume hit a record high in 2011, according to a report released yesterday by Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels, with 18 transactions accounting for $3.5 billion in dollar volume. The figure represents a 150 percent increase over the $1.4 billion in hotel transactions recorded in 2010, and beat the firm’s prediction of $2.4 billion worth of hotel deals being inked in 2011. [more]

The year was 2008 and the nation was in a serious financial crisis. Very few financial institutions were interested in providing financing for any real estate class. If the subject was financing for a hotel, the lender might have made the following remark: “Do not pass go, do not collect $200 and make certain never to talk to me about financing a hotel.” At the beginning of the year, I wrote an article entitled “Good riddance to 2009 for the U.S. hotel industry.” In it I quoted Mark Lomanno, the president of Smith Travel Research, when he said, “Good riddance to 2009, a year which we believe will go down as the worst in the modern hotel industry. The combination of a distressed economy in conjunction with panic pricing drove [revenue per available room, or revpar,] down to levels that were virtually incomprehensible just a year and a half ago.”

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