Hotel owner and operator MCR has acquired the 508-room Hilton Miami Airport Blue Lagoon from Park Hotels & Resorts for $118.25 million.
The Hilton property is MCR’s second hotel in the Miami airport submarket after its acquisition of the Hyatt Place Miami Airport East in December 2022, according to MCR’s news release. The airport is the busiest in the U.S. for international passengers and international freight, and it is undergoing a $5 billion capital improvement and expansion plan.
The hotel features four food-and-beverage outlets, an outdoor pool and hot tub, outdoor tennis and basketball courts, and 32,000 square feet of meeting space.
In a news release from Park, a hotel real estate investment trust, the company said the sale price represents a 6.2% capitalization rate on 2019 net operating income or 14 times 2019’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Those figures change to 7.9% and 11.1 times, respectively, when excluding capital expenditures.
The REIT intends to use proceeds from the deal to pay off an outstanding $50 million revolver balance and for general corporate purposes.
The Hilton Miami Airport hotel was part of the original portfolio owned by Park following its spin off from Hilton in 2017.
In the release, Park Chairman and CEO Thomas Baltimore Jr. said he is pleased with his company’s efforts to recycle capital out of its non-core hotels and improve the overall quality of its portfolio and balance sheet. In the past 12 months, Park has sold eight hotels for more than $435 million and used the proceeds to pay down debt and buy back common stock at a significant discount to net asset value.
“With $1.9 billion of liquidity, Park is well-positioned to pivot between offense and defense depending on market conditions, while opportunistically taking advantage of the ongoing dislocation between public and private valuations,” he said.