Officials with hotel- and retail-focused real estate investment trust Service Properties Trust have a portfolio of eight hotels under contract to sell.
The eight-property, 985-room portfolio is slated to sell for a combined $44.2 million. The transaction is separate from the REIT's plan to sell an additional 114 hotels to pay down debt.
Service Properties Trust officials estimate the total value of the 114-hotel portfolio, which all fall under Sonesta brands, at roughly $850 million.
Upon completion of the planned sales, Service Properties Trust will retain 59 Sonesta-managed properties and 25 non-Sonesta-managed hotels along with its 34% ownership stake in the brand company.
President and Chief Investment Officer Todd Hargreaves said during the company's third-quarter earnings call that it has received interest in the Sonesta portfolio from both institutional groups looking to buy large batches of hotels at once and potential buyers of smaller groups of one or two properties.
"It is very early, still very preliminary, and we're in the process of engaging a broker to run a process," he said. "But we have received significant interest because there's a lot of institutional groups that have really tried to scale these types of portfolios based on what's been in the market, what's currently in the market and, to my knowledge, what's expected to come to market for select-service and extended-stay hotels."
The full 14,925-room portfolio for sale is in those segments under three Sonesta brands — 31 Sonesta Select, 44 Sonesta ES Suites and 39 Sonesta Simply Suites — and the properties are expected to be sold encumbered with brands and converted to franchise agreements by Sonesta.
In addition to the newly under-contract hotels, Service Properties Trust completed the sale of six properties with 822 rooms in the quarter for $44.9 million during the third quarter and another five hotels with 642 rooms for $32.2 million since the start of October.
The full 114-hotel portfolio is expected to sell in 2025 with proceeds to repay debt, and REIT officials estimate selling the hotels will save them $725 million in capital expenditures in a six-year period.
Brian Donley, treasurer and chief financial officer, said the company is largely comfortable with its ability to raise capital and deal with its maturing debt.
"We are selling a significant number of hotels to raise cash to repay debt, but that's not to say we can't refinance it. This is part of a broader strategic decision to de-lever," he said.
Third-quarter performance
During the third quarter, Service Properties Trust's comparable hotel portfolio saw revenue per available room drop 0.8%, driven by a combination of a 0.6% fall in average daily rate and a 20-basis-point drop in occupancy, according to its earnings release.
Executives touted strength in their full-service portfolio — which is expected to become a larger focus after the sale of the Sonesta portfolio — with a 2.7% RevPAR increase excluding renovation impacts. The company spent $82.1 million in capital expenditures in the quarter.
The REIT posted a $46.9 million loss for the quarter with adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for real estate of $155 million.
As of press time, Service Properties Trust's stock was trading at $3.16 a share, down 63% year to date. The Nasdaq Composite was up 30.5% for the same period.
(This article was updated on Nov. 12 to clarify Service Properties Trust's asset strategy in the first few paragraphs.)