Hotel back on sales block after 3 years
Nearly three years after purchasing the 143-room Aqua Continental Surf, its owners have put the 21-story property on the market after receiving numerous offers from investors looking to scoop up Waikiki real estate.
Joss Hotel Partners LLC, a partnership led by local real estate investor Joe Leoni, began marketing the fee-simple property at 2426 Kuhio Ave. two weeks ago through a unit of brokerage firm Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.
The group, which bought the hotel for $11.3 million in 2005, expects it to sell for between $20 million and $30 million, Leoni said.
The owners last year briefly put the hotel on the market, but then decided to renovate it before selling. They later had a "change of heart," and never went through with the upgrades, Leoni said.
"What really has been driving this is we keep getting expressions of interest from serious buyers," he said. "The Waikiki hotel market is still, in our estimation, very strong so instead of us renovating and then selling it and then possibly half waste it or all waste it on a buyer who doesn't want what we did, we decided to sell it in the shape it's in."
The 82,000-square-foot building completed a major renovation five years ago and was upgraded just two years before Joss Hotel Partners bought it from a joint venture between GE Capital and San Diego-based American Property Management Co., Leoni said.
Jones Lang LaSalle in the past two weeks has had interest from 25 prospective buyers, he said. Leoni expects to sell the hotel by the summer.
The hotel's management contract with Aqua Hotels & Resorts will expire once the property is sold.