Host Hotels & Resorts executives last quarter said they were eyeing acquisition opportunities, and the company has delivered on this through a few deals since then.

The real estate investment trust's most recent acquisition was the 444-room Four Seasons Resort Orlando at Disney World Resort for $610 million in cash, or $1.4 million per key, which represents a 4.7% cap rate. The transaction was completed off-market on April 30.

The resort sits on 289 acres and is the only luxury resort within Disney World that's not owned by Disney, Host President and CEO James Risoleo said on a call to discuss first-quarter 2021 earnings with analysts.

All of Host's capital allocation strategies are designed to grow long-term earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, and the Four Seasons Orlando acquisition is expected to "elevate the EBITDA growth profile of the existing portfolio," Risoleo said.

From 2016 to 2019, the resort achieved 90% EBITDA growth, and was profitable in March 2021, Risoleo said. The hotel is expected to be profitable throughout 2021 and outperform underwriting expectations for the year, he said.

In the first quarter, the REIT acquired the 448-room Hyatt Regency Austin for $161 million and nearly 300 acres of land adjacent from the Hyatt Recency Maui in Hawaii, he said.

Host has $1.5 billion of total available liquidity following these transactions, which includes $131 million in furniture, fixtures and equipment reserves, he said.

When asked by analysts if Host would deploy the remaining capital this year, Risoleo said that's hard to answer because investing additional capital is very transaction-specific.

"We're evaluating a number of opportunities now," he said. "We've evaluated a number of opportunities over the course of this year that we left out because we didn't think they were the right thing to propose for one reason or another.

"[We're] back on the road looking at assets. I'm back on the road looking; we've got someone on the road today and he's looking at assets, and we're hopeful we're going to be able to get some additional capital smartly deployed."

Expectations within the industry that a lot of distressed assets would come to market given the pandemic-driven downturn have not panned out, Risoleo said.

The Hyatt Regency Austin was one distressed asset the company acquired.

"The ownership of the borrower in that deal was bearing down a UCC foreclosure action that was going to occur in the beginning of April. ... We bought the hotel in mid-March," he said. "It paid that borrower, it paid off all the debt associated with the hotel, [and] we acquired a really good asset."

Coming out of the "worst downturn we've ever experienced in the lodging industry and the pandemic-induced recession," Risoleo said as the U.S. turns the corner, now is the time to acquire the right assets.

Business volumes grew in each month of the first quarter, with revenue per available room of $84.10 achieved in March, which is 115% higher than the REIT's December RevPAR, Risoleo said.

Host's luxury and upper-upscale hotels outperformed markets by two points in March, and leisure markets such as Miami and Phoenix — as well as urban markets such as Northern Virginia and Philadelphia — outperformed the industry during the first quarter, he said.

Hotels in Washington, D.C., benefited from government agency group demand around the presidential inauguration in January, Risoleo said. D.C. is one of Host's highest-performing markets based on sequential RevPAR growth, he added.

Some of host's other open hotels benefited from special group business such as film production crews and sports groups "that collectively drove urban weekday occupancy 8.5 percentage points higher over the [first] quarter," he said.

Host currently has 1.5 million definite roomnights on the books for full-year 2021, Risoleo said. Approximately 1 million of those reservations are scheduled for the second half of the year.

Cancellations are still above 2019 trends but continue to decline week over week, he added.

Host's Marriott International-managed hotels booked 144,000 new rooms across the third and fourth quarters this year "with strong lead conversion rates compared to 2019," he said.

Risoleo said group roomnights currently on the books represent 11% of total available rooms for the third quarter and 13% for the fourth quarter.

RevPAR for the first quarter was $61.43, down 58.4% year over year, according to an earnings release. Occupancy declined 54.9% to 26.6%, and average daily rate decreased 7.8% to $230.76.

As of press time, Host's stock was trading at $17.51 a share, up 19.7% year to date. The NASDAQ Composite was up 5.6% for the same period.