No other commercial real estate sector has been quite so maligned as hotels (ok, maybe retail, but that’s another story). Now there appear to be a few rays of light emanating from the dark shroud that has been drawn over the hospitality industry.
Earlier this month, most of the major publicly traded hotel firms reported better than expected earnings results, including Marriott International, Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Wyndham Worldwide.
Now, over the weekend, New York-based private equity behemoth Blackstone Group secured an agreement from creditors of its Hilton Hotels Corp. to restructure its debt. Blackstone took the world’s largest hotel chain private at the height of the frothy CRE investment market in 2007 by ladling on $20 billion in debt. After months of negotiations, creditors now appear to be willing to cut about $4 billion of Hilton’s debt.
