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Insight Comment |
Residential resorts across the southern half of Europe are experiencing high demand thanks to changed patterns of working brought with the Covid lockdowns.
Destination developments are having to adapt with speed to take advantage, delegates at the ‘Residential Market: the New Home Away from Home’ session at the Resort & Residential Hospitality Forum 2021, heard.
However, thoughts that residential resorts remove the need for hotels were misplaced, said Daniel Correia, general manager for real estate at United Investments Portugal.
UIP is a member of the Al-Bahar Investment Group, the owner of Pine Cliffs Resort, Sheraton Cascais Resort, the wellness and spa brand Serenity and Hyatt Regency Lisboa.
He said: “A hotel must be part of a resort even if it is mostly residential. It is an anchor. For one thing, guests who visit the hotel are valuable potential buyers of apartments and villas.”
Jesús Abellán Gómez, CEO of Arum, a real estate expert who specialises in strategic planning, agreed.
Since residential resorts usually offer accommodation with high levels of service, the hotel will work as a hub for the acquisition and deployment of skills.
Christian Michel is European vice president of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, one of the world’s largest franchise hotel companies. He posed questions about which firms would be best placed to provide the services, embrace the innovations required, advise financiers on budgeting details, and bring together the numerous parties needed to make new-style residential resorts a success.
Philip Bacon, senior director at Horwath HTL, a hospitality and real estate specialist, said he had recently worked on a project with 27 separate sets of advisers.
Panellists also discussed the need to provide schooling if residential resorts were to appeal to families for year-round occupancy.
Arturo Rueda is head of feasibility and business planning at Sotogrande. He said: “2021 has seen an incredible pick up in sales. We’ve seen record numbers of transactions and record prices.” He also said that there is a shortage of residential property available.
Part of the reason, the panellist agreed, was that the nature of resort developments was new to providers of finance. The business models are quite different.
“We need to explain; work hard to share knowledge with investors; outline the reasoning behind plans that comprise golf courses and spas as well as hotels and restaurants,” he said.
Sotogrande is the largest privately owned residential development in Andalusia, Spain. Before joining Sotogrande, which is owned by Orion Capital Managers, Rueda held positions at Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, and Sacyr, the infrastructure development company.
The Resort & Residential Hospitality Forum 2021 was hosted in person at the Tivoli Marina Vilamoura Algarve Resort in Portugal.
Philip Bacon, who hosted the session, is a hospitality and real estate specialist with more than 35 years’ experience in professional business advisory services and general management in a wide range of independently managed and publicly listed international companies. Bacon has knowledge of most aspects of hotel and resort development and operations including residential mixed-use resort developments. He has worked with brands such as Mandarin Oriental, Aman, Four Seasons, Fairmont, Jumeirah and Armani.