Newmark expands Lodging Capital Markets Group to LA

Office will focus on deals in California, rest of western U.S.

Newmark Director Greg Morgan and Canyon Partners’ Nick Pappas (Getty, LinkedIn via Morgan, Pappas)
Newmark Director Greg Morgan and Canyon Partners’ Nick Pappas (Getty, LinkedIn via Morgan, Pappas)

Newmark Group Inc. is planting a flag in Los Angeles for its Lodging Capital Markets Group with a new hire and an executive move.

Canyon Partners’ Nick Pappas is headed to Newmark to be a senior managing director for the L.A. office, according to L.A. Biz. Newmark Director Greg Morgan will join him from the Washington, D.C. office.

Pappas and Morgan will focus on California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Mountain Region, essentially covering the western U.S.

Newmark’s Lodging Capital Markets Group arranges transactions for hospitality assets, including investment sales, joint ventures, and financing deals.

The move into L.A. is part of a wider expansion that also has the group going into South Florida and Texas. The plan overall covers four of five markets with the highest revPAR this year — Miami, Tampa, San Diego, and L.A.

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Lodging Capital Markets Group vice chairman Adam Etra said that group and corporate travel will fuel the hospitality sector’s recovery and was bullish on L.A., South Florida, and Texas.

“We have always been active in the southeast and Texas and on the West Coast, and we believe those three regions will be among the most active markets in our business over the next several years,” he said in a statement.

The post-pandemic decline in business-related bookings has been central to the hotel industry’s struggles over the last year and a half. There are some recent signs of recovery — including a 5.7 percent increase in group demand in the last two weeks of September — but the industry has yet to see pre-pandemic levels of business. That has dashed hopes of a full recovery this year.

Nationally, the hospitality sector, which includes restaurants and bars, added just 31,000 jobs last month and posted a net gain of zero jobs in August.

[LA Biz] — Dennis Lynch