Gencom, Lehman Sell Portfolio To RLJ Fund
-- Hotels, 8/13/2008 9:15:00 AM
MIAMI (August 13, 2008) – Gencom Group, the Miami-based international and domestic development and investment firm, in partnership with Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners, today announced the sale of a portfolio of six Hyatt Summerfield Suites hotels to RLJ Real Estate Fund III, LP (“RLJ”), an affiliate of RLJ Development, LLC, a privately held hotel real estate investment company.
“We are pleased to have completed this transaction with RLJ,” said Karim Alibhai, founder and principal of Gencom Group. “The sale is consistent with our original business plan of identifying, repositioning and disposing of assets at significant returns”.
“This is the first acquisition for the RLJ Real Estate Fund III,” stated Thomas J. Baltimore, Jr., president of RLJ. “The purchase is timely because the properties are just coming off complete renovations and conversions to the Hyatt Summerfield Suites brand. We look forward to expanding our relationship with Global Hyatt as the awareness of this brand grows across the country.”
RLJ has retained Aimbridge Hospitality to manage the three hotels in the Dallas area and White Lodging Services to manage the hotels in Austin, Colorado Springs and Houston.
The portfolio sale brings to a close a structured venture by Gencom Group and Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners that began with the acquisition of 50 percent of the Summerfield brand and six Summerfield Suites Hotels from Wyndham International in 2004. Following on that transaction, the Gencom Group/Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners partnership acquired nine Bradford Home Suites Hotels in March 2006. These properties are located in Dallas, Houston, Austin, Denver and Colorado Springs, Colorado. Six of the properties, now part of the RLJ acquisition, were then re-flagged under the Hyatt Summerfield Suites brand. Over the past three years, the Summerfield brand has significantly strengthened by its inclusion in the Global Hyatt family.
“We look forward to continuing our long-standing and successful relationship with Lehman Brothers and Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners and to the pursuit of similar opportunities in the luxury and extended-stay hospitality, mixed-use arena,” concluded Alibhai.
About Gencom Group
Founded in 1987 by Karim Alibhai, Gencom Group is one of the nation’s leading domestic and international investment and development firms specializing in the hospitality and residential real estate sectors. By aligning itself with prominent investors and institutional relationships, Gencom has maintained a strong market position in both luxury and mixed-use hotels and resorts with significant residential components, and in other hospitality-related investments that include both portfolios and single assets. The luxury and mixed-use projects fall primarily under The Ritz-Carlton flag, representing a total investment when completed in excess of $6 billion. The firm continues to opportunistically grow its portfolio holdings in key resort and urban markets in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Caribbean and Europe. Gencom is headquartered in Miami with representative offices in Houston, the United States West Coast and London. For more information, visit www.gencomgrp.com.
About RLJ Development, LLC
RLJ Development is a privately-held real estate investment company founded and led by Robert L. Johnson and Thomas J. Baltimore, Jr. and is the largest African-American hotel investment company in the U.S. with 121 hotels valued at approximately $2.6 billion. RLJ Real Estate Fund III, LP has $1.2 billion in equity commitments from 16 institutional investors including several major public and corporate pension funds, financial institutions and a dominant hospitality entity. Combined with leverage the RLJ Fund III will have total purchasing power of nearly $4 billion. www.rljhotels.com
About Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners
Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners is a full-service real estate merchant banking business which operates two opportunistic equity funds aggregating $4.0 billion of equity capital and one mezzanine investment fund aggregating $1.1 billion of equity capital. The funds are an extension of Lehman Brothers' global real estate franchise which has a long and successful track record advising, underwriting and investing and has participated in over $300 billion of real estate transactions since 2000.
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