The real estate industry is in a difficult adjustment period, which is an objective fact that has been witnessed by all in recent years. In this environment, even the industry bigwigs are faltering, seeking new respite through broken arms, and many of them are focused on the hotel assets that have allowed them to win land opportunities and bring a premium to the project. Only at the alternation stage of the old and new years, Country Garden, Overseas Chinese Town, Wanda, Sunac and so on have begun to sell hotels one after another.
Selling, selling, selling, real estate companies and hotels are constantly being put on the shelves
Not long ago, the Guangzhou Equity Exchange official *** Country Garden was listed on the Guangzhou Equity Exchange to transfer a number of assets, including hotels, office buildings, commercial properties, office buildings, apartment buildings, etc., and the total assets to be transferred are 38$1.8 billion. The Phoenix City Hotel in Zengcheng District is impressively listed, and it is also the most expensive project in this package, which is 12600 million yuan.
Phoenix City Hotel in Zengcheng District is the largest five-star landscape-themed hotel in eastern Guangzhou, with a total construction area of 97,912At 69 square meters, it is also one of the few first-tier city hotel projects in the Country Garden Group, which opened in 2003 and was renovated in 2017, with a total of 573 luxury rooms.
In the same period, two of Sunac's high-end hotels in Dujiangyan City, Sichuan Province, Chengdu Sunac Steigenberger Hotel and Vimelett Hotel were auctioned, with a starting price of about 59.7 billion yuan, with an appraisal price of about 74.7 billion yuan, and the start time is 10 o'clock on January 22. Interestingly, the auction was withdrawn on the same day.
According to public information, the above two hotels are part of the hotel cluster of Sunac Chengdu Wanda City, which is one of the 13 cultural tourism projects acquired by Sunac China from Wanda in July 2017.
Steigenberger Chengdu Sunac Hotel is a luxury hotel jointly created by Huazhu and Sunac Cultural Tourism, with a total of 235 guest rooms and suites, equipped with 7 independent open-air hot spring pools, 24-hour heated swimming pool and vitality fitness center. Chengdu Sunac Vioyue Hotel is Sunac's own hotel brand, the hotel has 460 special rooms, the rooms are designed with panda and Ahri IP as design elements, creating unique parent-child theme rooms.
Sunac's sale of real estate is already familiar enough, and the above is also the fifth cultural and tourism asset project that Sunac has been auctioned and transferred in recent years. Among them, the hotel projects include InterContinental Chengdu Global Center Paradise Hotel, Wuxi Sunac Mao supporting hotels and Dianchi Song Pin Hotel. These former landmark hotels were all ruthlessly discounted and "fire-sold".
Like Sunac, many real estate companies have become more and more frequent in recent years.
Previously, R&F Properties included 73 hotels acquired from Wanda in the list for sale,** with hotel assets accounting for about 95% of the total,**followed by Shimao**'s Shanghai Bund Hyatt Shanghai, InterContinental Shanghai Sheshan Shimao, Shanghai Shimao Regency Hotel, and Shimao Conrad Hotel, which was packaged and sold with Shanghai Shimao Plaza; More than 10 hotel assets such as Pullman Hotel, Beijing Xinhualian Regency International Hotel, Sheraton Yinchuan Xinhualian Hotel, and Sofitel Shanghai Xinhualian transferred by Macrolink**; Sunshine City** has transferred more than 20 high-quality asset ...... including Hilton
And in 2023, the number of hotels sold has reached a new height. According to incomplete statistics from the Milestone Research Institute, the number of hotels auctioned with more than 100 million yuan in 2023 has exceeded 130. Behind these auctioned hotels, there are many real estate tycoons such as Wanda, Vanke, and OCT. For example, the Bulgari Hotel in Shanghai, with 24The 300 million yuan *** pushed the hotel auction to a new climax, and the seller behind it was OCT Asia.
In 2024, when the transaction is at its peak, how can real estate hotels face up to the market environment?
With the recovery of the cultural tourism market, the value of hotel assets is constantly recovering, which explains one of the reasons why hotel bulk transactions are booming in 2023. Huang Dongqing, vice president of Maiju, said that if 2023 is counted as the first year of hotel transactions, 2024 will be the peak year of hotel transactions, and there are still many high-end hotels in the market waiting to be taken over.
From the point of view, the above view is not unreasonable.
First of all, natural selection, "eliminated" has long been traced.
In the past, the hotel business was a "battleground" for real estate companies. CRIC has a set of statistics showing that by the end of 2021, only 15 of the top 100 real estate companies in the country have no hotel business.
Draw the attention back to the era of real estate ** accompanied by the rise of real estate hotels. At that time, hotels had many advantages for real estate companies.
First, as a tool for real estate enterprises to acquire land, especially in order to enhance the image of the city or create a certain plot, additional conditions will be listed in the same period of land sales - it must be a high-end hotel and need to be self-sustaining and self-operated, so as to be able to give certain concessions on the land.
Second, for real estate enterprises, the hotel business can hedge risks and invest in hotels, which can increase the diversification of investment properties, provide stable cash flow, balance market fluctuations, and resist risks.
Third, asset appreciation, from the perspective of the star level of the hotel, the real estate hotels are mostly high-end and above hotels, which has a considerable boost to the market valuation of the project.
In addition, the reasonable tax avoidance and financing brought by the hotel are also profitable for real estate companies.
However, after the regulation of industry policies such as housing not speculation and three red lines, real estate is no longer soaring. Under the current situation of the industry with heavy debts and continuous thunderstorms, "alive" has once become the core keyword for the development of many real estate enterprises. Therefore, selling assets and recovering blood from broken arms is the primary way for real estate companies to choose at present. Hotels with a long payback period and the ability to replace a large amount of cash flow are naturally the first to be sold off.
Secondly, frequent transactions should not only be regarded as an industry crisis, but should also be a reshaping of the pattern that does not break or stand.
Judging from the signals released by the current hotel transactions, there are many mismanagement, lawsuits, and inconsistent positioning in these hotel assets.
For example, according to the announcement of OCT, in 2022, the saleable assets of some assets of the Shanghai Suhewan project, where Bulgari Shanghai is located, recorded a revenue of 1400 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 435%；Loss after tax was 05.2 billion yuan, equivalent to a fourfold increase in losses in the previous year. Revenue for the first half of 2023 is 11.9 billion yuan, with a loss of 6.9 million yuan after tax. Although noble as Bulgari, although sitting on the first-line view of Lujiazui and the Bund, although the 400-square-meter suite on Chinese New Year's Eve has opened ** about 22The sky-high price of 30,000 yuan, but the business performance did not meet expectations, and still could not escape the fate of being sold.
At the same time, the overall shrinkage of performance is also plaguing high-star hotels with real estate. According to the "2023 China Hotel Business Statistics" released by hotel consulting agency Horwath, according to its sample statistics, the performance of domestic five-star and four-star hotels will fall to the bottom in 2022, among which the gross profit of five-star hotels per room available for rent is not even comparable to the level of three-star hotels before the epidemic, and the difference in gross profit of hotels of various grades is narrowing.
Huang Dongqing once said that the investment of many five-star hotels is not a complete market behavior, and does not have the feasibility of input-output balance, which also leads to the income per available room of the hotel is very unsatisfactory, and even lower than the limited service hotels dominated by economy and mid-range hotels.
To sum up, it is not difficult to find that this is actually a wake-up call for investors. Investors are asked to re-evaluate and analyze the value and investment potential of such assets, while also considering whether the real estate and hospitality industries are undergoing a deep round of adjustment and transformation. Of course, OCT is also giving a "sample" to some other debt-ridden real estate companies. Tell everyone what to do in this kind of tuyere, whether to consciously choose to cut meat and fill the pit, or to go all the way to the black as always.
Finally, the hotel market that real estate companies want to get involved in, a new battlefield has been quietly built.
Although it seems that real estate companies are selling off hotel assets and divesting hotel business, real estate companies are more like following the development law of the industry and walking out of a development path that conforms to their own characteristics. This can be glimpsed from the growth history of international hotel brand giants.
Taking Marriott International Group as an example, in the early stage of development, hotel properties were mainly self-owned and leased, and the operation and development were mainly achieved in the form of asset-heavy operation. After the brand matures, try to switch to the asset-light model leading model, accelerate the introduction of the franchise model, reduce leverage, and continue to improve brand awareness; In the current mature stage of development, it uses financial instruments to divest its heavy assets, and divest its properties in the form of REITs, so as to obtain service income under a variety of business models, and further enhance its ability to resist risks. In 2020, the scale of Marriott Real Estate has reached 128900 million US dollars, ranking first in the United States hotel REITs, and Marriott International's high-end hotel franchises account for about 72%, basically realizing asset-light operation.
Its high-quality development path also provides a reference for the development of real estate hotels in China.
Looking back at real estate hotels in recent years, this trend can also be found. Behind the more concerned selling, selling, selling, selling, and selling, real estate companies are also constantly building and building wine management companies to help themselves cut from an asset-heavy track to an asset-light track. Whether it is Jinmao, Poly, Greenland, or Vanke, they have all set up real estate wine management companies, and many enterprises have established their own brand matrix, forming a full-brand matrix from luxury hotels to five-star and four-star, to special and selective, to enhance consumer reach.
In 2014, Yuanzhou Group decided to shift its development focus from real estate to asset-light hotel management output;
In 2015, Powerlong Real Estate established a new hotel group, and determined to focus on the asset-light approach, adopting the leasing, franchise and export management model to develop its own hotel brand;
In 2016, Wanda Hotel also took the first step towards asset-light export;
In 2017, Shimao Starwood Hotel Management Co., Ltd., a joint venture between Shimao Group and Starwood Capital, took the export management of its own brand as its core business.
In 2018, The Mulian Hotel Management Group, a subsidiary of KWG, was established, expressing its asset-light model to achieve development, and successively launched three product lines: high-end resort hotels, boutique design hotels, and luxury five-star hotels.
In June 2021, Jin Mao Hotel held a press conference in Sanya, officially announcing that Jin Mao Hotel has changed from an asset-heavy asset owner to an asset-light development path, and launched five brands in one go: Jin Mao Jiayue, Jin Mao Chengyue, Jin Mao Puxiu, Jin Mao Yinyi and Jin Mao Tianyue, with an industrial line covering high-end, ultra-high-end business and vacation sectors, and pointing to the ...... of the domestic high-end hotel market
Under the surging wave of hotel auctions, real estate companies have established wine management companies that are also standing side by side. And these are the new battlefields of real estate hotels in the future.
In the new cycle of the times, real estate hotels are at the forefront of the trend?
Just as real estate has gone wild for 20 years, so have the five-star hotels that were once closely related to it, the frenzy is disappearing, and rationality is returning. In this context, the real estate wine management company is ushering in an important watershed in the new stage of the competition.
So, what else can real estate hotels do in order to stand at the forefront of the new era?
1. Pay attention to the dynamics of urban renewal plots, and it is still worth paying attention to by leveraging strength.
At the moment when the cultural tourism industry continues to recover, there are still places that hope to activate the cultural tourism market with the help of star-rated hotels and provide high-quality services. For example, on January 4, Qingdao announced that in order to promote the high-quality development of the tourism and accommodation industry, it will introduce more than 10 high-end brand hotel projects by the end of 2025, continuously expand the scale of star-rated hotels, and give a one-time reward of 5 million yuan to newly assessed five-star tourist hotels.
As far as the current situation is concerned, the situation of requiring the construction of high-star hotels when land is transferred still exists, especially in the land of urban renewal, but the overall situation has decreased compared with the past. Real estate companies can maintain their relatively rich experience here, and take advantage of the lingering warmth to further empower the project and obtain high-quality hotel assets.
2. Consolidate the matrix of its own brand, build popularity and export to the outside world.
Although it can be seen above that many wine management companies have begun to consciously launch their own brand matrix, in the current market, these so-called private brands have not shown much splash. For example, since the launch of Jinmao's brand matrix, only the flop of Lijiang Jinmao Grand Hyatt Snow Mountain Hotel has not made great progress.
Compared with Marriott and other brands that are mature enough, real estate hotels are still a little immature, and there is still a long way to go. After all, high-quality products and sufficient market awareness are the basis for maintaining steady and good development.
3. Join hands with excellent hotel brands at home and abroad to strengthen hotel management capabilities.
At first, it imitated Google, JD.com imitated Amazon at first, and Didi imitated Uber at first. Back to the real estate hotel, the same applies, first imitate and then surpass, first copy and then innovate.
Maintain a strong alliance with excellent hotel brands at home and abroad, and constantly absorb each other's excellent capabilities in hotel management, and internalize them into their own core**. For example, Jin Mao Hotels has been strategically cooperating with major international hotel groups such as Marriott, Hilton, and InterContinental for more than 20 years, and has mature and complete asset management capabilities for the whole life cycle of high-end hotel design, development and operation.
4. Pay attention to the integrated development of culture, business and tourism, and shape a complete ecological industrial chain.
From the perspective of cultural tourism real estate and hotel industry, China's accommodation industry has shifted from high-speed growth to high-quality development. Hotels are no longer a single accommodation, and a more diversified accommodation industry will become a new direction. The integration of Chinese business travel has become a hot topic from ** to local attention in recent years.
Real estate companies can carry out multi-dimensional integration and collision with the hotel business. For example, cultural tourism towns, theme parks, pension industries and other fits, but also long-term and short-term rental apartments, co-working and retail and other comprehensive commercial formats, and finally form a cluster effect and shape a complete ecological industrial chain.
In addition, real estate hotels can also provide a new solution to their operation and expansion by issuing asset-based products and using financial means to revitalize assets, in addition to providing themselves with a new financing method and realization model.
Write at the end:
The hotel industry has gone through the era of rough and unrestrained, gradually becoming rational, stock optimization, from the perspective of historical laws, any major changes are essentially a game after the market weighs the pros and cons, in this process, it is bound to be full of risks and challenges, but at the same time contains unlimited opportunities. This is still true for real estate hotels. Those companies that have taken the initiative to survive through constant means are more likely to be the ultimate winners. A new battle song has been played, and the real estate hotel is also ushering in a new life.