A consortium led by Israeli hotel company Fattal Hotels has signed a binding agreement to acquire Queens Moat Houses, the owner of a portfolio of 20 hotels across Germany, for €265 mln.
A consortium led by Israeli hotel company Fattal Hotels has signed a binding agreement to acquire Queens Moat Houses, the owner of a portfolio of 20 hotels across Germany, for €265 mln.
The transaction, which is being financed by M&G Investments and DRC, is the first real estate hotel deal of this magnitude since the demise of Lehman Brothers in 2008, according to Brown Rudnick, which advised the buyer.
Queens Moat Houses' portfolio consists of 20 hotels, 15 of them Holiday Inns, four Best Western Hotels and one Queens Hotel. It provides a total of 3,600 rooms in the German cities of Berlin, Munich, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Wolfsburg, Hanover, Baden-Baden, Aachen, Mönchengladbach and Karlsruhe.
'The investment is in line with our expansion plans - the hotels complement our existing Leonardo chain of hotels perfectly. We still want to continue to grow and are negotiating further projects in major cities in Europe,' said David Fattal, chief executive of Fattal Hotels/Leonardo Hotels.
Following the acquisition, Fattal Hotel Group owns 85 hotels, 54 of which located in Europe.
The transaction is set to spark the beginning of hotel sector consolidation in Germany, according to Tuvi Keinan, partner at Brown Rudnick, who sourced the deal. The country saw €1.2 bn invested in hotels last year, according to new figures published by Jones Lang LaSalle.
The deal also highlights growing demand for hotel assets on the part of Middle Eastern investors. 'International buyers from the Middle East and Asia, often in the form of large pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and private individuals, have in many cases started to replace the more traditional sources of capital,' said Jonathan Hubbard, CEO Northern Europe at JLL Hotels & Hospitality.
