Dorado Ritz not under contract for sale, but owners open to ‘alternatives’
The Dorado Beach, A Ritz-Carlton Reserve is not under contract for sale at this time, but one of the luxury hotel’s developing partners, PRISA Group, confirmed that it is always exploring alternatives for its properties.
Federico Stubbe Jr., CEO of PRISA Group, told News is my Business “as developers, after a property is stabilized, we’re always exploring, talking, and open to alternatives to restructure and capitalize our properties.”
“But I can confirm to you that the Dorado Ritz property is not under contract for sale,” he said in an interview. The property is also under the management of Caribbean Property Group.
His comments responded to a report by the Wall Street Journal that said the venture is exploring a possible sale of the property that opened for business in December 2012, following a $342 million investment.
The beachfront hotel, designed to attract the wealthiest of clients, has had double-digit growth in 2021 when compared to the pre-pandemic year of 2019, Stubbe said.
“This is across all industry measurements. We’ve had a record year in revenues for the hotel and the 2022 pipeline shows revenue on the books associated with reservations that is more than twice what we had for this same date in 2019-2020,” said Stubbe, giving credit to promotional efforts by the Discover Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rico Tourism Co.
“The data for the industry is extremely positive and Puerto Rico has been able to position itself in a very solid way as a safe destination in the United States,” said Stubbe.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Dow Jones all published that investor John Paulson, who owns the Condado Vanderbilt and the La Concha hotels in San Juan, is considering putting the properties on the block. Paulson bought the iconic hotels in 2014 for $260 million, as News is my Business reported.
The investment was made in partnership with hotel operator International Hospitality Enterprises.
Through a local spokesperson, Paulson & Co. would not comment to this media outlet whether it is putting its San Juan properties on the block.
Bloomberg reported that Paulson is “looking to unload the hotels as Puerto Rico may emerge from its more than four-year bankruptcy in early 2022.”
The billionaire investor has reportedly hired real estate firm JLL to float the possibility of a sale. Earlier this year, JLL headed the sale of the Sheraton Old San Juan to Driftwood Capital, for an undisclosed amount.
“There’s a lot of positive buzz around the sale of hotels. The nature of the beast is that one attends unsolicited offers if they’re the right ones,” said Stubbe, saying he did not know how the would-be sale of the Dorado Ritz was included in the report. “Since Paulson is talking, perhaps it could have been included by association.”
