(Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Hilton Minneapolis sells for $143 million
The city's largest hotel sells to private equity firm.
July 26, 2016 at 4:58PM
The 821-room Hilton Minneapolis, the state's largest hotel, has sold for about $143 million.
DiamondRock Hospitality Co., the Maryland investment firm that has owned the 25-story hotel in downtown Minneapolis since 2010, sold it to another real estate investment firm "that has a long-standing relationship with the company," the firm said. It wasn't more specific.
As of Tuesday, there was not a certificate of real estate value that publicly documented the transaction. But the buyer appears to be Walton Street Capital of Chicago. Eric Mogentale, a principal at Walton Street Capital, said via e-mail that it was "involved in the investment." He didn't give any more details.
The hotel, on Marquette Avenue S. just a block from the Minneapolis Convention Center, was built in 1992 and is a fixture of the city's convention business. It has a 25,000-square-foot ballroom, big enough for 2,800 people, and has 35 meeting rooms.
"This is one of the premier convention hotels in the Midwest," said Kirby Payne, a hotel consultant and president of HVS Hotel Management in Newport, R.I. "It's an important hotel in the convention market."
DiamondRock renovated the hotel's rooms in 2014 and gave the lobby a face-lift in 2011. It employed about 400 people at the hotel.
DiamondRock, based in Bethesda, Md., paid more for the hotel — $155.5 million — when it bought it six years ago from an affiliate of investment company Haberhill in Potomac, Md., and Starwood Capital Group Global, a private equity group in Greenwich, Conn.
It called the sale, along with two other recent hotel sales in New York City and Orlando, Fla., "opportunistic" deals that helped improve its portfolio and financial performance. It forecast higher profit margins as a result of the deals.
The Hilton Minneapolis last year yielded revenue per available room of $115.44, which was below the weighted average of its other properties, according to DiamondRock's annual report.
The building had an estimated market value of $139.2 million, according to Hennepin County property records.
The value of the latest transaction for the Hilton Minneapolis worked out to a value of about $174,000 per room. The record amount for a Minneapolis hotel property came in the 2014 sale of the Graves 601 Hotel to Loews Hotels and Resorts, a $65 million deal that worked out to about $255,000 per room.
Nicole Norfleet • 612-673-4495
Twitter: @nicolenorfleet
Photo by Carlos Gonzalez of the Star Tribune: The 821-room Hilton Minneapolis, the city's largest hotel, has sold for about $143 million.
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