Grand Hyatt San Antonio River Walk Hotel and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg (Hyatt, Twitter/@Ron_Nirenberg, Getty)
The Grand Hyatt San Antonio River Walk was sold for $109M to an Arizona-based non-profit in a deal that will eventually see the hotel transfer in-ownership to the city.
Hyatt Hotels Corporation sold the building located at 600 E. Market Street to Community Finance Corporation, an Arizona based nonprofit that works to finance or maintain government buildings. CFC now owns the Grand Hyatt building in-trust for the City of San Antonio, which also owns the land the 1,003-room hotel sits on. Once a new set of hotel bonds are paid off in an estimated 40-years, the building will transfer ownership to the city, according to San Antonio officials.
The hotel and the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center next to it was built in 2005 using $208.1M in bond funds. In a bid to help finance the hotel, the city agreed to cover debt payments on the bonds for the Hyatt Hotels Corporation with local tax revenue if the hotel wasn’t fiscally able to make the payments itself.
In 2020 and 2021, due to a loss of business during the COVID-19 pandemic, the city paid over $10M in debt payments for the Grand Hyatt, according to city financial statements. City Council approved several items during a meeting this past March to facilitate the sale of the hotel to a third party, in-part to absolve the city of making any further debt payments.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg called the deal to sell the Hyatt a “win-win” during the March meeting.
David Peters, the senior vice president of the Corporate Transactions Group for Hyatt Hotels Corporation, said during a March press conference that Hyatt is looking to offload its owned properties and focus on a fee-based revenue stream. Peters said that originally Hyatt had wanted to acquire the city-owned land so it could sell the hotel and land off together. But pivoted its strategy when the city refused to sell the land.
The San Antonio River Walk is nearly 15-miles of entertainment areas, parks, residential areas, restaurants and natural sites that has been called the “crown jewel” of San Antonio, according to the city’s website. The latest figures from the U.S. Census shows San Antonio as one of the fastest growing markets in the country.
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