A 300-room hotel across the street from the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim is expected to see a major renovation following its sale to a Hong Kong-based investor.
Anaheim Plaza Hotel & Suites, a 1960s-era, apartment-style hotel at 1700 S. Harbor Blvd., was purchased in late November by an affiliate of Wincome Group, a Hong Kong-based real estate owner, according to property records.
The property was sold by Pyrovest Corp., an off-shore based investor that paid a reported $18.2 million for the hotel in 1991.
Wincome Group and its affiliates own the Avenue of the Arts Wyndham Hotel in Costa Mesa, as well as two other hotels in Anaheim.
It also owns office, retail and residential developments in Hong Kong, Japan, and Europe, according to the company. Wincome said it has had investments in California since the 1980s.
Estimated Sale Price
Terms of the sale were not immediately disclosed. It is estimated that it sold for about $47 million, or roughly $155,000 per room.
That would make it the year’s most expensive hotel deal in the Anaheim resort area and the third-priciest hotel sale in Orange County in 2014, according to hotel brokerage data.
The estimate would work out to a price of nearly $5.5 million an acre for the property, which is on 8.5 acres.
The site has one of the more enviable locations in the resort area, prompting its high per-acre price. It is across the street from the main entrance to the Disney Resort, at the southeast corner of Harbor Boulevard and Disney Way.
The hotel is immediately to the east of the Anaheim Gardenwalk shopping center, and the property’s acreage was once envisioned to be part of future phases of the Gardenwalk development, which also calls for hotels and other amenities to be built.
Redevelopment Candidate
Anaheim Plaza Hotel’s location, and the age of the existing hotel at the site, makes it “an obvious redevelopment” candidate for the new owners, according to Rod Apodaca, senior vice president for CBRE Group Inc.’s hotel brokerage and investment sales division.
Details of any development have yet to be disclosed.
Wincome executives could not be reached for comment last week.
“The buyer views this as a strategic long-term acquisition with great future potential,” CBRE officials said in a statement last week.
“The buyer has a history of acquiring, upgrading and managing strategically located hospitality properties to offer their guests a truly unique experience,” said Apodaca, who represented the buyers in the deal, along with CBRE colleague Bob Kaplan.
Among its other deals, Wincome paid $21 million in a foreclosure auction in 2009 for the Wyndham Orange County, a 273-room hotel near the Segerstrom Center for the Arts and South Coast Plaza.
The new owners put in a reported $14 million in renovations to the Costa Mesa hotel, including upgrades to guest rooms and event space, as well as a restaurant expansion. The property has since been rebranded as the Avenue of the Arts Wyndham Hotel.
In Anaheim, Wincome and its affiliates own the 358-room Anabella Hotel—OC’s 25th largest hotel based on room count. The hotel is next to the Anaheim Convention Center on Katella Avenue.
It also owns the Carousel Inn and Suites, a boutique hotel across the street from the Disneyland Resort.
Busy Area
Any new construction at the Anaheim Plaza Hotel site would add to a busy slate of hotel development already on the books for the resort area.
More than 2,000 additional hotel rooms could be built in the Anaheim resort area over the next five years, according to city estimates.
Recent openings in the area include the 178-room Hyatt Place Anaheim Resort, which debuted in September, and the 172-suite SpringHill Suites by Marriott in Anaheim, which opened this summer.
A 252-room Hyatt House Anaheim Resort at the intersection of Harbor Boulevard and Katella Avenue is expected to open next year, as is Great Wolf Lodge in Garden Grove, a 603-room hotel that will also include an indoor water park about a mile from Disneyland.
The Anaheim resort area has more than 25,000 hotel rooms, and the area makes up about 45% of Orange County’s total hotel rooms.
