MHG Capital picks up Hilton hotel in Anaheim for $62M

MHG Capital has paid $62 million for a 251-room Hilton hotel in Anaheim.

The Newport Beach-based real estate investor with ties to Taiwan bought the DoubleTree by Hilton Suites Anaheim Resort Convention Center at 2085 South Harbor Boulevard, the Orange County Business Journal reported. The seller was the O’Connell Hotel Group, based in Anaheim.

The price works out to $247,000 per room.

It marks the fourth largest hotel deal in the last year in OC, and is the priciest for Anaheim since June 2021, when the Holiday Inn & Suites Anaheim Disneyland sold for $63.2 million.

O’Connell Hotel Group built the hotel in 2006 next to Anaheim Convention Center and less than a mile from Disneyland Resort. The full-service hotel has 7,500 square feet of meeting rooms and three restaurants: Agio Ristorante, Grappa Lounge and Café Biscotti.

Nightly room rates for next month start around $150, according to the property’s website.

MHG funded the purchase with a $40.3 million loan from Taiwan Cooperative Bank Ltd.

It’s the second local purchase for MHG Capital, which paid $34.2 million for the Four Points by Sheraton Anaheim in 2015.

MHG now owns 11 hotels, including its recent purchase, from Taipei, Taiwan, to New York, including seven hotels in California, according to its website.

The company, also known as Manhattan Hotel Group Capital, got its start in 2012 and bought its first hotel in New Jersey. It went public in 2015 with shares listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, but was taken private in 2019 to launch a U.S.-based private capital arm in Newport Beach.

MHG says it has invested more than $500 million in select and full-service hotels totaling more than 2,000 rooms over the past decade, and continues “to search for unique investment opportunities in prime urban locations.”

Other California holdings include the Hilton Garden Inn in San Diego and the Sheraton Sonoma Wine Country in Petaluma.

Its president and founder, Kitty Lo, is the author of “How to Establish a Hotel Empire in the U.S.”

Orange County now has five hotels with 811 rooms under construction, the largest being the 350-room Disney Vacation Club tower at Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, according to the Business Journal.

The OC hotel market surpassed 2019 last year, with total revenue per available room up nearly 130 percent when compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to STR.

Anaheim’s recovery has somewhat lagged that of coastal markets in Orange County, however, though the city is expected to mark its full recovery this year. Occupancy rates across Anaheim hotels now hover at 71 percent, slightly off from 78 percent in 2019, according to Visit Anaheim.

— Dana Bartholomew