Oxford Capital Group Buys 5 Bay Area Hotels
Chicago-based Oxford Capital Group has purchased a five-hotel portfolio in the Bay Area, it announced this week.
Three of the hotels — the King George Hotel, the Hotel Griffon and The Inn at Union Square — are in San Francisco. The other two are in Silicon Valley: Palo Alto’s Creekside Inn and the Hotel Los Gatos. The seller was Greystone Hotels, and the price of the five-property transaction wasn't disclosed.
It hasn’t been a great year for San Francisco hotels, especially considering that hotels were enjoying a long streak of record-setting levels of tourism before the coronavirus pandemic. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that by the Hotel Council of San Francisco's estimate, only half of the city’s 215 hotels are open, and those that are open were roughly about one-third full in October.
“We remain sanguine about the medium to long-term desirability of downtown San Francisco and Silicon Valley,” Oxford Capital Group and Oxford Hotels & Resorts CEO John Rutledge said in a statement.
Rutledge is a booster for cities, telling Bisnow last month that he thinks the pre-pandemic trend toward urbanization “will re-emerge with a vengeance” once the pandemic is in the rearview mirror.
Oxford Capital said the Bay Area portfolio was “conservatively leveraged” and noted the strong locations of the hotels. The plan is to reposition many of the properties, as Oxford Capital has done with many value-add properties in Chicago.
The company has made notable investments in San Francisco over the last couple of years. In 2019, after years of looking to get into the SF hotel market, Oxford Capital jumped in head-first, buying four hotels in an off-market deal.
