Coral Reef hotel
to sell condo unitsAt the end of the year, owner
Tatibouet will take over management
The Coral Reef Hotel, a 21-story property on the makai side of Kuhio Avenue near the center of Waikiki, is being converted into a hotel condominium. The units will be sold but managed as hotel units when the buyers don't want to be there themselves.
The building, owned by hotel developer Andre Tatibouet, has been operating as the Aston Coral Reef.
It is operated as part of Aston Hotels & Resorts, which in turn is a subsidiary of ResortQuest International Inc., the Memphis, Tenn.-based company that has 30-plus Aston hotels in Hawaii mixed with 12 similar hotel and condominium management businesses across the country.
Kelvin Bloom, president of Aston Hotels & Resorts Hawaii, said yesterday that Aston has management rights for what is now the Aston Coral Reef until the end of this year. At that point Tatibouet will exercise his right to take over the management.
In anticipation of the handover, Tatibouet has retained Hawaiian Island Homes Ltd., a company operated by real estate broker Peter Savio, to handle the conversion to a hotel condominium, as well as sales.
Sales will begin Saturday, with the building divided into 247 units with six different floor plans ranging from studios to two-bedroom suites.
Savio said prices will range from $59,500 to about $150,000. The Queen Emma Foundation owns the land under the building. Lease rent to buyers will start at about $150 a month for the smaller units, Savio said.
Savio has been involved in several such hotel conversions, including turning Outrigger Enterprises Inc.'s Ohana Waikiki Marina into a hotel condominium.
Such conversions offer investors a chance to buy their own apartments and derive income from their use as hotel units, but have them available for their own use when they want, Savio said.
"People who come here all the time on vacation can stay a month or two in their own unit," Savio said, and have the unit produce hotel income when they are not using it.
Tatibouet, whose family started a hotel business in the late 1940s, founded Hotel Corp. of the Pacific in 1968 and, in 1986 began doing business as Aston Hotels & Resorts. In May 1998, he sold the business for $30 million to ResortQuest.
Tatibouet also got 1.7 million shares of ResortQuest but later disputes over the ownership of the Aston name and other matters pushed him out of the running of ResortQuest and Aston in March 2002. Tatibouet, however, kept the ownership of several properties, including the Coral Reef.