BERLIN — Sweden-based Pandox, a hotel ownership platform with a 157-hotel portfolio, mostly recently has focused its growth in other European countries such as U.K. and Germany, but Chief Commercial Officer Jonas Törner said there will be more focus on the Nordic countries going forward.
In an interview with Hotel News Now at the International Hospitality Investment Forum, Törner said the time is now right to turn Pandox's attention back closer to home.
"We want to focus on the Nordics again because we've been absent from that market for quite some time," he said. "The expansion we've had for the last 10 years has basically been in Germany, the U.K. and Ireland."
He said part of making that happen is strengthening Pandox's Nordics-focused transactions team.
The company's most recent acquisition — which closed in February — was the 400 million Swedish krona ($37.6 million) purchase of the Best Western Hotel Fridhemsplan in central Stockholm. The hotel is the company's first acquisition in Sweden or across the Nordic countries in roughly a decade.
"We're very happy with that, to do our first acquisition in Stockholm in a very, very long time," he said.
Törner said that doesn't mean Pandox will no longer look for opportunities in the other countries where the company has a presence, but the biggest challenges right now are "finding liquidity, finding the right targets to acquire."
"Currently, we see the most liquidity in the U.K., so we have been purchasing single assets for the last 15 months," he said.
He added that's indicative of the types of deals that can get done in the current environment, focusing on single-asset deals where you can use operational improvements to justify the costs.
"Our base is hybrid leases, revenue-based leases, but that's hard to find for the time being," he said.
For more from HNN's interview with Pandox's Jonas Törner, watch the video above.