A recently built Four Seasons hotel in Napa Valley may be headed for a near record-breaking sale price.
A handful of investors have made competing bids upwards of $170 million for the 85-room property, according to the Wall Street Journal.
That would be around $2 million per room, a price threshold broken only twice before in the U.S. — by the Montage Hotel Beverly Hills and a Four Seasons in Hawaii.
The Napa Valley property was built by Boston-based Alcion Ventures. Managing director Martin Zieff said the firm spent five years picking the development site and 10 years building the property. It is set to open in the second quarter of this year.
The coronavirus pandemic rendered 2020 one of the worst years ever for the U.S. hotel industry and the outlook for 2021 isn’t great. STR projects that industry revenues won’t fully recover until 2024.
Opportunistic investors have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to scoop up distressed properties on the cheap.
Investors are confident in the Napa Valley Four Seasons for a few reasons. Wildfires in 2017 destroyed some of the high-end resort properties in the area, reducing competition. Two of the remaining resorts, run by Auberge Resorts Collection, performed well in the latter half of 2020. Demand for boutique-style properties overall remains healthy.
“It shows the resiliency of the luxury market, especially the smaller boutique properties,” said Dan Peek, president of the hotel group at Hodges Ward Elliot.
[WSJ] — Dennis Lynch