The Student Hotel Opens First German Hotel in Dresden
Date: November 2018
Location: Prager Strasse, Dresden, Germany
Name: The Student Hotel
No. of Keys: 306
Seller: was an Ibis Hotel
Owner: The Student Hotel (TSH) has opened its first German hotel. The hotel will have 306 rooms with co-living and co-working spaces.
In addition to accommodations for normal hotel guests, the former Ibis Hotel property also has rooms for students to let for a semester or an entire year.
It also has a wellness/fitness area. TSH founder and CEO Charlie MacGregor says that Dresden is the perfect starting point for expansion.
The company’s next plans are for a hotel near Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Further openings in Bologna and Madrid are planned for 2019; openings planned for 2020 include Florence, Paris, Porto, Rome, Delft, and Vienna. TSH says it intends to own a total of 65 properties in European cities over the next five years.
The Student Hotel was founded by Scottish entrepreneur Charlie MacGregor in Amsterdam. The company’s roots lay in Scotland where the MacGregor family started building student accommodations for The University of Edinburgh in 1982.
Their current locations include Rotterdam, Amsterdam West, Amsterdam City, The Hague, Groningen, Eindhoven and Maastricht.
In 2017 the Melon District properties in Barcelona and Paris were upgraded with new facilities and services further integrating them into The Student Hotel group.
New locations are set to open in Florence, Dresden, and Bologna in 2018; Delft, Madrid and Berlin in 2019; and Vienna, and Rome in 2020. The group plans to have 41 properties in European cities by 2021
The Student Hotel was started in 2006 after Charlie had been in the Netherlands for two years.
He said ‘I’d been involved in student accommodation for a long time in the UK. When I was in Netherlands, I saw that students were being offered sea containers as a new housing. I saw that there was a four-year waiting list for housing corporation rooms. I saw that the system couldn’t cope and was having a negative effect on the students and their ability to study at their chosen university. So, I started to try to replicate the UK model of student housing. I wanted to take all the good things I learned in the UK and make it better — much better!
We wanted to serve the students better than they are being served. We wanted to bring parents into their experience. We wanted to bring different communities all together in one building.
Besides Charlie MacGregor, Felix Hillen is Managing Director and a partner in The Student Hotel group. Felix is responsible for all procedural and operational aspects of The Student Hotel. Before joining The Student Hotel Felix worked as Asset Manager and Financial Director for Eden Hotel Group.
APG, asset manager for Dutch pension fund ABP invested €100m in 2015.
THPT Comment: We have written up Charlie MacGregor and the Student Hotel company before…very impressed with their raid growth and congrats on this first hotel in Germany.
First Seen: Thomas Daily
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