Hotel Lenders Rush Back In Even With Growing Labor Shortage Crisis
Photo Credit: The active hotel lender market is throttling back to pre-pandemic levels. Labor is a different story. Pixabay / Engin_Akyurt
Skift Take
Hotels face massive worker shortages this summer, but investors don't care and still want to buy up assets. Chalk this up to taking the long view and hoping hotels find a way to win back workers from other industries.
U.S. hotels are a hot investor commodity despite the industry’s surging problem of not enough workers heading into the summer travel season.
While daily rates, revenue, and property values are all likely to return to pre-pandemic levels — and even eclipse them — the hotel industry’s labor market faces permanent changes. Other industries like retail offer more competitive wages to hotel workers with easily transferrable skills.
But investors don’t seem to mind that swelling operational issue. There’s only about a 60-lender gap between today’s market and the pre-pandemic one in the U.S., according to CBRE’s "U.S. Hotels State of the Union" report.
“The expedited return of capital to the market is faster than what we’ve seen historically,” said Mark Owens, head of hospitality capital markets at CBRE Hotels. “This is a far better return of liquidity to the market than we've seen historically for hotels, so that bodes really well for all of us.”
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