Omni Obtains $250M in Financing for Three Hotels

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor 

Omni Hotels Corp. has gotten its hands on a total of $250 million in financing for a group of three properties encompassing the Omni Fort Worth, Omni Houston and Omni Chicago. The hotel company relied on commercial real estate and capital markets services provider HFF to arrange the loan, which was provided by Prudential Mortgage Capital Co.

Prudential was just one of many lenders eager to provide financing for the premier hotels. “The transaction was very well received, and there was a diversity of lender types,” Whitaker Johnson, a senior managing director with HFF, told Commercial Property Executive.” 

The three properties are among the leading hotels in their markets. The 614-room Omni Fort Worth made its debut in 2009, sprouting up just across from the 400,000-square-foot Fort Worth Convention Center. Four hours to the south, the 378-room Omni Houston, part of Omni’s portfolio since 1992, provides 378 guestrooms in the Houston’s coveted Galleria/Uptown submarket. And in the Windy City, the 347-room Omi Chicago, which was a Hyatt Regency property before Omni acquired and converted it in 1993, offers a location at the core of the Magnificent Mile.

“I think the quality of these assets and the quality of the sponsor was the primary reason it was well received by the market,” Johnson said. “The premium that is typically associated with hotel financing was virtually non-existent in this transaction.”

The deal dovetails with experts’ capital markets predictions for 2013. According to PwC’s annual Emerging Trends in Real Estate report: “In the debt markets, it will be ‘more of the same’–good assets with solid income streams and good credit borrowers will have no trouble attracting financing from life insurers and banks eager to choose from the pick of the litter.”