ResortQuest Hawaii sells for $109M

ResortQuest Hawaii owns and manages about 28 hotel and condominium resort properties throughout the state

Interval Acquisition Corp., a provider of vacation ownership services, said yesterday that it has agreed to acquire RQI Holdings Ltd., the parent company of ResortQuest Hawaii LLC, for about $109 million in cash.

ResortQuest Hawaii, which owns and manages about 28 hotel and condominium resort properties throughout the islands, has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Gaylord Entertainment Co. since the company paid about $109 million in stock to acquire the properties in 2003.

The ResortQuest Hawaii name and personnel are expected to remain the same throughout the transaction, said Kelvin Bloom, president of ResortQuest Hawaii.

As part of the current transaction, Gaylord Entertainment will retain its 18.1 percent equity interest in the joint venture of the ResortQuest Kauai Beach at its Makaiwa property, as well as its 19.9 percent ownership stake in the Aston Waikiki Beach Hotel.

The closing is expected to take place during the second or third quarter of 2007.

The purchase is a natural extension of Interval International's core business, said Craig M. Nash, chairman and chief executive officer of Interval International.

Based in Miami, Interval International has been in the vacation ownership business for more than thirty years. The company has a more than 2,200 resorts in 79 countries.

The ownership change is the third major corporate repositioning for ResortQuest Hawaii in the last four years. Formerly Aston Hotels & Resorts, the company rebranded to ResortQuest Hawaii in 2005, saying said that it would begin acquiring more properties and breaking into the upscale home-rental market.

As Aston, the company was Hawaii's second-largest privately owned hotel operator after Outrigger Hotels & Resorts. It was founded in 1967 by the Tatibouet family, which had been in the hotel business in Hawaii since opening a small Waikiki hotel in 1948.

Principal owner Andre S. Tatibouet sold Aston to ResortQuest in 1998 for nearly $30 million, plus 1.7 million shares of ResortQuest stock, and later left the business following disputes over the use of the Aston name.

Aston was purchased along with 13 other companies by Memphis, Tenn.-based ResortQuest International in the mid-1990s.