by two real partners in several joint ventures:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20101207_New_hotel_near_Penn_stirs_hopes.html
Posted on Tue, Dec. 7, 2010
New hotel near Penn stirs hopes It's for long-term stays.
The groundbreaking will be the city's first for a hotel
this year.
By Suzette Parmley
Inquirer Staff Writer
Philadelphia has not seen construction begin on any new
hotels so far this year, but work will begin on at least
one before 2011 begins.
Campus Apartments L.L.C. will break ground Wednesday on
an upscale, $50 million Homewood Suites by Hilton in
University City, catering to medical professionals,
patients, and their families who are planning to stay for
a while.
We started digging and found really no place to stay for
an extended amount of time in University City, said
David Adelman, chief executive officer of
Philadelphia-based Campus Apartments, one of the largest
privately held student-housing companies in the country.
Staying in a full-service hotel can get expensive, so we
knew we wanted an extended-stay hotel which looks a lot
like apartments.
To accomplish that, each of the 136 suites in the
all-suite hotel will have a full kitchen and one bedroom
and average of 500 square feet of space. Additional
amenities include a fitness center, complimentary shuttle
service, and an indoor pool.
The amenities will allow for a sense of normalcy that
will certainly be important to this market, Bill Duncan,
global head of Homewood Suites by Hilton, said in a
statement.
Adelman said his firm decided on Hilton Worldwide for the
brand since it manages the nearby Hilton Inn at Penn. The
Homewood Suites at 4109 Walnut St. will employ about 300
people, including construction workers.
He said that demand for such a hotel grew as the area
blossomed into a destination for world-class health care,
life sciences, and higher education, including the
University of Pennsylvania, Penn Medicine, and Children's
Hospital of Philadelphia.
The market for this product is both patients and their
families . . . to make this a really good experience for
people while they're here receiving treatment, he said.
The hotel will be one of only a few all-suites hotels in
central Philadelphia and the only one in University City,
said Peter Tyson, vice president of Colliers PKF
Consulting USA.
Such hotels appeal greatly to commercial and leisure
travelers with extended stays, he said. Travelers
working on longer-term projects at the universities or
the hospitals, and families of patients in, or post-op
'outpatients' at, the University City hospitals for
extended periods will be naturals for this hotel.
Tyson said the area's only two hotels - the 238-room
Hilton Inn at Penn and the Sheraton Philadelphia
University City Hotel with 331 rooms - continue to
perform well, particularly midweek and on weekends, when
there are events at the University of Pennsylvania or
Drexel University.
He said the two hotels usually perform at or above the
average occupancy for the city annually. For October, the
latest data available for central Philadelphia's combined
45 hotels, the occupancy rate was 79.5 percent.
Further, the Sheraton University City is now 40 years
old, and the Inn at Penn is over 10 years old, Tyson
said. Some new hotel product in the area should be
well-received.
Ed Grose, head of the Greater Philadelphia Hotel
Association, called the hotel, scheduled to open in March
2012, a perfect fit for West Philadelphia, and he said
he hoped it was a precursor to more hotels to come.
We are hoping that this shows signs of a recovering
credit market, Grose said, so that we will hopefully
see the addition of another anchor hotel for the
Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Adelman, of Haverford, acknowledged that getting
financing for a hotel in the current climate was no easy
feat. He had been marketing the project for three years.
Lenders looked at the demographic data as well, and
agreed with our story, he said. We're probably going to
be one of the city's biggest construction projects in
2011.
Campus Apartments manages about $1 billion worth of
properties and 27,000 beds in 26 states. It has a working
relationship with the University of Pennsylvania dating
to 2000.
Adelman said that Penn approached him about a new hotel
because Campus Apartments already managed the
university's off-campus apartments and the two were
involved in several joint ventures.
We're real partners in the redevelopment of University
City, he said. We're excited to be a part of the area's
renaissance and investing our capital to make University
City a better place.
After the hotel's completion in the spring of 2012, the
second phase of the two-phased project will be a
neighboring 150,000-square-foot office building.
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UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
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