A New York group purchased a coastal Santa Barbara County hotel in a bet that improvement in the hospitality sector will stay on track.
AWH Partners bought the 158-room Kimpton Goodland at 5650 Calle Real in Goleta, California, for an undisclosed price in late 2021, according to a Jan. 20 statement from the buyer. The seller was San Francisco-based hotel investor KHP Capital Partners.
The property sold for $33 million, according to a source familiar with the deal. KHP purchased the hotel for around $41 million in September 2015, according to CoStar data.
Representatives of the buyer and seller did not respond to requests for comment.
Russell Flicker, founder and managing partner of AWH Partners, said in the statement the hotel was acquired "at an extremely attractive basis we would never have been able to achieve pre-pandemic." He said the investment firm plans to renovate and rebrand the hotel.
"With minimal new supply, a general lack of available sites and costly land prices, the Santa Barbara market has high barriers to entry, and we are pleased to have found this attractive opportunity, which was never offered to the public on the same terms," Flicker said in the statement.
The property, built in 1969, had operated as a Holiday Inn and was remodeled and rebranded in 2014.
The Santa Barbara-Santa Maria hotel market features roughly 11,000 hotels with a high percentage of luxury or upper upscale hotels, according to CoStar data. Over the past 12 months, hotel sales totaled roughly $112 million in the market, up from the previous 12 months, when $22.6 million in sales were completed, according to CoStar data.
The Goodland was one of five hotels that AWH acquired in 2021. Those investments totaled $240 million and the company plans to inject roughly $30 million renovating the properties.