Knight Frank is poised to make a move into the US hotel market.
Its hotel and leisure team, led by Derek Gammage, is in New York this weekend for the New York University Hotel Investment conference where it will announce a joint venture called Knight Frank Access.
The partners are Interbank Brenner, Knight Frank’s UKhotel division, and Knight Frank Expotel, which is the company’s Australian and Far East hotel operator.
The deal follows the move that Insignia, the US parent of Richard Ellis UK, made two weeks ago when it acquired Hotel Partners, a global consultancy based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Under the terms of that deal, Hotel Partners will combine its European operation with Richard Ellis’s hotel division at Berkeley Square House in London. Last year Hotel Partners bought hotels worth $1bn.
However, the president of Strategic Hotel Capital of Chicago, Laurence Geller, who is also speaking at the New York conference told Estates Gazette before the announcement was made that he had “heard lots of pomp and hype from Knight Frank but little action”.
“Anyway, Knight Frank is picking the wrong time. The market here in the US is thinning and we need another real estate agency like a sick headache.”
