M&L Hospitality expanding in Australia
M&L Hospitality executive chairman Michael Kum has big plans for Australia.
He has opened his latest Sydney CBD hotel, the West Hotel, and the Singaporean based executive is planning more.
We are focusing very much in Australia. We have heavily invested about $1.5 billion,” Kum told The Weekend Australian.
“The bottom line is Australia probably has lower margins relative to holding costs and yields.”
The 73-year-old former shipping magnate who began building his hotel portfolio in 2009 says the challenge is finding a good site in Sydney as sellers wanted to sell high and buyers wanted a good price.
“That makes it more difficult,” he told the newspaper.
“It’s hard to buy around Australia unless you go to Darwin or somewhere less popular with tourism. We only have one or two projects we are working on at the moment in Australia,”
His latest venture, the West Hotel, is managed by Hilton as part of its Curio Collection.
The hotel is located only a few doors down from his 892-room Hyatt Regency in Sussex Street that recently underwent a $250 million extension.
The 182-room hotel was developed on a former electrical substation within 13 months.
The West Hotel is part of an Australian portfolio that features the Swissotel in Sydney’s Market Street, the Novotel in Perth and the Double Tree by Hilton in Melbourne’s Flinders Street
However, Mr Kum said the main focus for acquisitions would be on Melbourne and Sydney in light of the numbers of tourism arrivals and the extent of business activity in both cities.
The Washington DC-based Curio Collection global head Mark Nogal said his group was working with the Singapore-based hotel investment platform and was looking at a few deals in Australia with some local developers.
He said the Australian market was always popular.
“I think the market has tremendous potential,” Mr Nogal told The Weekend Australian.
by Leon Gettler, January 15th 2017
