LA: Bright Spot for Hotel Room Undersupply
We recently visited with Mack Urban CEO Paul Keller, who showed us one of six parking lots in the South Park area of downtown LA it picked up last fall from Evoq Properties for $80M. The lots—in the shadow of the towering AT&T Center at Olive and 12th—were bought in a 50/50 deal with AECOM; there, Mack Urban will do five projects over a seven-to-10 year period, building 1,700 to 2,000 residential units. But the first project will actually be an AC Martin-designed hotel of 200 to 300 rooms, of a category and brand being evaluated by JLL's hotel group. Paul confirms a “4,000-hotel-room deficit” associated with the convention center—if you compare it, experts say, with the number of hotel rooms in very successful convention markets like San Francisco, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Anaheim.
