AWH Partners buys California hotel

AWH Partners has acquired the Kimpton Goodland Goleta, a hotel near Santa Barbara, California. No financial terms were disclosed.

PRESS RELEASE

AWH Partners, LLC (“AWH Partners” or “AWH”), a vertically integrated real estate investment, development, and management firm, today announced that it has acquired the Kimpton Goodland Goleta (the “Goodland” or the “Hotel”), a 158-room hotel near Santa Barbara, California. Parties in the Hotel’s capital structure approached AWH for assistance in resolving challenges stemming from COVID-19. AWH executed a transaction that avoided a public process and effectuated a smooth transition for all parties. AWH’s wholly-owned hotel management company, Spire Hospitality, is currently transitioning management of the Goodland Goleta and has begun a rebranding process of the hotel. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The acquisition of the Goodland Goleta represented AWH’s fifth deal in 2021, all of which are located on the West Coast in robust, long-term growth markets with significant regional leisure demand. The five acquisitions total over $240 million in purchase price, with over $100 million of total equity invested and $30 million in renovations planned. In addition to the Goodland, AWH, in partnership with best-in-class institutional investors, acquired the following hotels in 2021:

Villa Florence Hotel, San Francisco: A 189-room independent hotel and more than 10,000 square feet of retail in one of the best locations in San Francisco, adjacent to Union Square.
DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Anaheim, Orange County: A 461-room property located adjacent to the UCI Medical Center and in close proximity to Angel Stadium, Disneyland, and the Anaheim Convention Center.
Hilton Garden Inn, Fremont Milpitas: A 145-room, high-quality, 2021-vintage property adjacent to Tesla’s flagship Silicon Valley factory.
Hilton Garden Inn, Portland/Lake Oswego: A 179-room hotel located in an affluent Portland suburb adjacent to the highest quality office space in the state outside of Downtown Portland.

“AWH is thrilled to diversify our expanding portfolio of attractive hotel properties and deepen our exposure to high-growth West Coast markets with the addition of the Goodland Goleta hotel, another asset acquired at an extremely attractive basis we would never have been able to achieve pre-pandemic,” said Russell Flicker, co-founder and managing partner of AWH Partners. “With minimal new supply, a general lack of available sites and costly land prices, the Santa Barbara market has high barriers to entry, and we are pleased to have found this attractive opportunity, which was never offered to the public on the same terms. We look forward to renovating the lifestyle hotel and welcoming guests to this highly accessible leisure destination.”

Chad Cooley, co-founder and managing partner of AWH Partners, added, “Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we made an intense effort to stabilize our portfolio so that we could focus our attention on what we do best – investing in complicated, distressed and unique hospitality assets. We made a substantial financial commitment to keep our leadership team together and incentivized, and we poured resources into technology and data to super-charge our acquisition efforts in 2021. Looking back, our investment activity speaks for itself, and we are thrilled with how we are positioned heading into 2022.”

“AWH was formed amid the global financial crisis, with much of our initial portfolio acquired out of severe distress,” said Jon Rosenfeld, co-founder and managing partner of AWH Partners. “As we continue to navigate the economic challenges brought on by the pandemic, we are in a unique position to leverage our deep experience across market cycles to continue identifying, executing and creating value for attractive investment opportunities in the U.S. lodging space as the industry rebounds and demand across channels accelerates. While many anticipated a quick deluge of opportunities to materialize early in the pandemic, we now know there will be interesting pockets of opportunities for at least the next 24 months in our space.”

AWH: A Focus on Technology
Over the last two years, AWH has used a lull in market activity to develop and aggressively expand its use of technology, including substantial investments in human and data resources. AWH has integrated underwriting with directly data-fed models, implemented a new supply impact algorithm ranking for 60,000 hotels and engaged research companies to upgrade AWH’s proprietary market demand metrics. AWH’s activity in 2021 was supported by these investments, which directly enhance AWH’s speed of analysis, deal visibility, and market intelligence. AWH is uniquely positioned to continue to leverage technology to identify, pursue and acquire mispriced and misunderstood hospitality real estate.

About AWH Partners, LLC
AWH Partners, LLC (“AWH”) is a privately held, vertically integrated real estate investment, development, and management firm that has invested in 9,500 hotel rooms across 35 hotels, representing billions of total real estate value. The firm’s unique operating model and boutique nature enable it to source, structure and execute hospitality real estate investments on a streamlined and expeditious timeline. Since 2010, AWH and its principals, Russ Flicker, Jon Rosenfeld and Chad Cooley, have amassed a sizeable portfolio of hotels across the country. AWH also owns Spire Hospitality, a top-tier, national hospitality platform and AWH Development, a full-service real estate development company, providing complete vertical integration in the hospitality investment space. For more information, please visit www.awhpartners.com.