One of the newest hotels in the John Wayne Airport area has been snapped up by a hospitality investor and developer in Colorado.
McWhinney Real Estate Services Inc., a Loveland, Colo.-based firm with other prominent Orange County holdings, bought The Hyatt House Irvine/John Wayne Airport this month, a 149-unit property that opened early this year.
The seven-story hotel is near the intersection of Main Street and Von Karman Avenue, a little more than a mile from the airport.
Terms of the deal were undisclosed by the buyer; property records show it sold for about $42.1 million, or under $283,000 per room.
It’s Orange County’s second-priciest hotel sale of the year, trailing only July’s $95 million sale of the Hyatt Regency Newport Beach, according to records of real estate market tracker CoStar Group Inc. The Hyatt Regency was bought by Los Angeles-based Woodridge Capital Partners LLC for about $232,000 per room—nearly $51,000 per room less than the Hyatt House—but the sale didn’t include the underlying land at the 26-acre property next to the Back Bay on Jamboree Road.
Great Wolf Developer
The roughly 84,000-square-foot Irvine hotel at 2320 Main St. was sold by Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corp., which developed it. It’s among a cluster of office buildings and new apartment developments on Main Street. It will continue to be managed by Hyatt Hotels, according to McWhinney.
Hyatt House properties are described as upscale, “residential-style” extended-stay hotels; rates at the Irvine location are about $150 a night.
Along with 1,160 square feet of meeting space, the hotel includes a fitness center, bar and bistro.
Its outdoor pool is nowhere close to the size of that at McWhinney’s best-known property in OC, Garden Grove’s Great Wolf Lodge Southern California, a 603-suite property that includes a 105,000-square-foot water park, the state’s first indoor water park resort. It’s about three miles down Harbor Boulevard from Disneyland Resort.
McWhinney opened Great Wolf Lodge in 2016 at an estimated cost of $285 million.
Mayer Project
The Irvine hotel is the second of two Hyatt Houses to open in OC since 2016. The first was a 252-room property on Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim developed by Newport Beach-based Lake Development Co.
More are planned in Southern California.
Irvine-based Mayer Corp. this month announced plans for a five-story, 200-room Hyatt House Hotel to be on the University of Southern California Health Sciences Campus in Los Angeles. The project is being financed in part by a $49 million loan from L.A.-based Canyon Partners Real Estate LLC.
The Hyatt House will be the only hotel on the health sciences campus, and will provide about 18,000 square feet of conference center space and 14,000 square feet of neighborhood-serving retail space, according to a statement by Canyon Partners.
Mayer Corp. has built a number of hotels on Coast Highway in Huntington Beach, including the 517-room Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa and the 285-room Waterfront Beach Resort, which recently expanded with a new 152-room tower.
