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1. Union Investment sells Barceló Raval hotel in Barcelona
Real estate management firm Real I.S. AG has acquired the 186-room Barceló Raval hotel in Barcelona from fellow German owner Union Investment for an undisclosed price. The hotel was built in 2008 and is located in Barcelona's El Raval district.
According to CoStar, Union Investment acquired the property in 2013 for approximately $48 million. In a news release, Union Investment said it had acquired the hotel more than a decade ago via its open-ended real estate retail fund UniImmo, which has 114 assets across all real estate asset classes with a total value of approximately $17 billion.
André Pinto Gomes, senior investment manager of hospitality at Union Investment, said “due to the strong performance of the hotel market in recent years, the Spanish hotel transaction market can be classified as early-cyclical by European standards and is seeing lively interest from investors.” In its own press release on the deal, Real I.S. said the hotel measures 9,660 square meters (104,000 square feet).
2. Canada’s Germain Hôtels announces consolidation, $115 million funding round
Last week, Québec City’s family office Germain Hôtels morphed out of two formerly separate divisions, Groupe Germain Inc. and Alt Canada Investment Corporation SEC. Its executives added the new entity has completed a new funding round of 160 million Canadian dollars ($115 million). A company news release stated “CDPQ with participation from the Fonds de Solidarité FTQ and Investissement Québec” led the new funding round.
Germain, which opened its first hotel in 1988, has 19 hotels. The company has several hotels in development, including the Alt Hotel Ottawa Airport, Le Germain Hotel Casino de Montréal and Le Germain Hotel Vancouver. The company's hotel portfolio is entirely in Canada and across three brands: Alt, Escad and Le Germain.
3. China, US slash tariffs for 90 days
China and the U.S. have reached an agreement to end their tariff war at least for three months, the BBC reports. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said that “both countries would lower their reciprocal tariffs by 115% for 90 days.” The decision came after high-level talks between the two countries in Switzerland.
Under the new agreement, due to start on May 14, tariffs on Chinese goods into the U.S. will be cut to 30%, while tariffs on U.S. goods into China will be cut to 10%. The U.S. had imposed 145% tariffs on China, which retaliated with 125% tariffs of its own on U.S. imports. Global stock markets reacted favorably to the news.
4. Dubai’s Palazzo Versace goes to auction yet again
The 215-room Palazzo Versace Dubai is back on the auction block once more, according to Gulf News, which said the hotel — but not its branded residences — has a “base bid price [of] … 600 million United Arab Emirates dirhams” ($163 million).
This is the second time this year the hotel has been on the market. In late February, the Palazzo Versace Dubai
was up for auction with a guide price of 1.1 billion Emirati dirhams.
Gulf News reported the new “bid price … suggests that the banks holding the related debts on their books want to sell it at the earliest” opportunity. CoStar information lists the owner as Dubai’s Emirates International Holdings, which has only this one property on its books.
5. More disruptions feared at US airports this summer
Following the second radar outage in two months at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday there could be similar disruptions at other U.S. airports in the coming months, the New York Times reports.
While emphasizing the safety of U.S. airspace, Duffy said in an NBC interview that the U.S. needs to quickly overhaul its "antiquated systems" in air traffic control at airports across the country.
“What you see in Newark is going to happen in other places across the country. It has to be fixed,” Duffy said.
With just weeks to go before the start of the summer travel season, AAA anticipates 45.1 million Americans will travel domestically during Memorial Day weekend. Between Thursday, May 22, and Monday, May 26, AAA projects 39.4 million people will travel by car while 3.61 million will travel by air.