Bradford Allen Buys 100-Room Hotel Outside Phoenix for $24M

Bradford Allen Hospitality Investments has picked up a 100-room hotel outside Phoenix for nearly $24 million.

The Chicago-based investor bought the Aloft Glendale at Westgate hotel at 6920 North 93rd Avenue, in Glendale, the Phoenix Business Journal reported. The seller was HCW Development, based in Missouri.

The price works out to nearly $240,000 per room.

HCW built the four-story, 55,000-square-foot hotel in 2017 at a cost of $12.5 million, and opened it the following year in the city’s Westgate Entertainment District, nine miles from Downtown Phoenix.

The hotel is a stroll from State Farm Stadium, Desert Diamond Arena, the Tanger Outlets and AMC theater.

The Aloft hotel has rooms with nine-foot ceilings, platform beds, LCD TVs and walk-in showers. It also has business conference rooms, a gym, swimming pool, a live-music dining bar and a gift shop.

The hotel is Bradford Allen’s second acquisition in the Westgate Entertainment District, joining nearby TownePlace Suites Glendale, an extended-stay hotel purchased in late 2022.

“With the Phoenix metro continuing its growth trajectory and Glendale – which has hosted multiple Super Bowls and is the site of the NCAA Final Four in April – as an epicenter of commercial activity, this acquisition further bolsters the firm’s strategy to acquire high-quality hotels in experience-driven markets,” Aghfar Arun, director of Bradford Allen, said in a statement.

The Aloft purchase marks one of the largest hospitality deals in metro Phoenix this year, according to Vizzda.

Phoenix hotel sales fell last year after a strong showing in 2022, and sales remain slow, according to the Business Journal.

But the Glendale deal pales in comparison to London-based Henderson Park’s purchase of the historic, 705-room Arizona Biltmore hotel in January for $705 million. The seller of the “Jewel of the Desert” was New York-based Blackstone, for $1 million per room.

Other local hotel sales this year include the Country Inn & Suites by Radisson in Phoenix, which sold in January for $11.2 million. At the same time, a shuttered hotel in Tempe sold for $13.3 million.

Early this year, the lender for the 290-room Westin Tempe filed a notice of trustee sale for an auction on April 24.

Last year, three Valley properties sold for more than $100 million, according to the newspaper. There were 30 total hospitality sales for the year compared to 46 in 2022.

At the same time, hotel construction has boomed in recent years across greater Phoenix. At the end of last year, there were more hotel rooms under construction in the region than anywhere in the U.S. That includes 26 hotels under construction with 4,527 rooms, according to CoStar.

Another 40 hotel projects with 4,748 rooms were in final planning stages, plus 46 projects and 5,298 rooms in the planning pipeline.

Bradford Allen, founded in 2003 by Jeffrey Bernstein and Laurence Elbaum as an office brokerage, since 2022 has acquired six hotels with a combined 800 rooms in Arizona, New York and Iowa, with plans “to significantly grow its portfolio this year,” according to a news release.

— Dana Bartholomew