Queensgate Buys 4 Main Grange Hotels in London for £1bn
Date: November 2018
Location: London, UK
Name: Grange St. Pauls, Grange Tower Bridge, Grange City, Grange Holborn
No. of Keys: 1,317
Seller: The Matharu Brothers, who have built up Grange hotels from humble beginnings with the The Adelphi Hotel on Cromwell Road, London Kensington. The brothers – Harpal, Raj and Tony – are all approaching retirement age. A sale of the four hotels could allow one or more of the brothers to exit the business.
Buyer: Queensgate Investments has bought four properties from Grange Hotels in a £1bn deal.
The Grange brand covers 17 properties, all but one of them in London (Bracknell).
The sale had attracted interest from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Starwood Capital Group, CBRE Global Investors and Aprirose.
The portfolio is made up of the 433-bedroom Grange St Paul’s, EC4; the 370-bedroom Grange Tower Bridge, E1; the 307-bedroom Grange City Hotel on Cooper’s Row, EC3 (pictured left); and the 207-bedroom Grange Holborn, WC1 (pictured right).
The deal with Queensgate marks a crucial step forward in what has been a lengthy sale process.
US real estate services provider HFF formally kicked off a sales process for some or all of Grange’s £1.3bn empire in March 2017 but investors have been circling the hotels since 2016, when Leon Partners, which was bought by HFF last year, began working on the prospective deal.
Queensgate, headed by chief executive Jason Kow, is a partnership between Peterson Group, LJ Partnership and the Kow family.
It has been looking to expand its UK hotels presence over the past year and was an under-bidder on Lone Star’s £800m Jurys Inn portfolio, which was ultimately sold to Pandox last year.
The company is in the process of working up major redevelopment plans for the Kensington Forum Hotel, SW7, which it bought from Apollo Global Management in 2015 for around £400m. It is aiming to build a new 749-bedroom hotel, 340 serviced apartments and 46 flats.
Last year it also bought upmarket hostels business Generator from Patron Capital for €450m (£400m).
Price: £1bn
Price per Key: £759,301
THPT Comment: Great move for both parties…the word was whether they would sell the smaller hotels, but clearly the bigger ones have the attraction for someone like Queensgate. A good price per key, for Grange.
First Seen: Estates Gazette
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