The private equity owners of QHotels are preparing to put the business up for sale in a process expected to raise £650m.
Sankaty Advisors and Canyon Capital have appointed Rothschild to find a buyer for the luxury hotel and golf resort business just over a year after they acquired its debt via the Irish Banking Resolution Corporation’s €7bn (£5.1bn) Project Rock sell-off.
The joint venture between Bain Capital-owned Sankaty and Los Angeles-based hedge fund Canyon Capital bought the loans for around £350m.
They have since added six hotels to the portfolio, acquired from De Vere hotels and golf resorts in November last year, for around £160m.
The total QHotels portfolio consists of 27 properties, comprising 3,800 bedrooms, including the Westerwood Hotel & Golf Resort in Glasgow, and Hellidon Lakes Golf & Spa Hotel in Northamptonshire. The trophy hotel in the portfolio is The Midland in Manchester, valued at circa £59m.
The hotel brand, set up in 2003 by Michael Purtill as Quintessential Hotels and backed by Alchemy Partners, went into administration in 2013.
A QHotels spokesman said: “The hotel sector is showing strong financial performance and demonstrating good returns. In periods like this it is absolutely normal for investors such as ours to look at the market and the opportunities that exist.”
The sale is the latest in a string of high-profile hotel portfolios to be put on the market totalling more than £1.3bn.
These include Kew Green Hotels, Jupiter Hotels, Malmaison and Hotel du Vin, Chapter Hotels, the Mint Portfolio of Double Tree hotels, and Starwood’s De Vere and Principal Hayley hotels.
Gerard Nolan of Gerard Nolan & Partners said: “Regional hotels are improving on trade, and investors are still interested in good returns, underlying tenant demand, low inflation and the general opinion that the UK economy is growing, and that hotels are a barometer of this.”
