By Megan Sullivan
Transforming older or historic buildings with good bones into new hotels preserves the past while building the future. With the right approach, architects and interior designers can craft a modern hotel concept around properties with built-in histories that will offer guests authentic experiences and help revitalize communities.
Adaptive reuse projects have become more and more attractive to developers, especially since lending has been constricted in our uncertain economic environment and new hotel construction in the U.S. remains limited.
With capital constraints on one side of the equation, and true demand drivers on the other, Jeffrey Warwick, U.S. managing director for the vertically integrated real estate development, investment, and management company Portman Holdings, says development will be held back for a while. “The true key demand drivers for new product aren’t as fundamentally robust as they have been in past cycles,” Warwick says from his Atlanta office. “It’s going to be a while before we see the sustainability of demand drivers for new product. There will be some, as we see in multi-family, but in the broader real estate market it’s not going to be there.”