Central Business District Eagerly Awaits Three New Hotels
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Three major hotel development projects are making progress in downtown Austin’s Central Business District. The area lacks a sufficient amount of rooms needed to house convention-goers, but a number of plans to remedy the issue of room stock have already fallen by the wayside.
Cody Lyon of the Austin Business Journal explains:
Smith Travel Research Inc. lists nine hotel projects as active in downtown Austin. If they were all built, they would add 3,219 rooms to the area. But a lack of financing has many experts counting them out of the running.
“I would be very surprised if half the rumored projects in Austin actually get built over the next three years due to on-going difficulties in the debt markets and the increased levels of required equity that many developers are simply not capable of producing or committing to,” Yiankes said.
According to Lyon, the district’s room stock will increase from 7,674 to about 10,000 if the three projects continue as expected.
For more than two years the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau, backed by a vocal Mayor Lee Leffingwell, has lamented the need for more hotel rooms downtown. Huge conferences, including one put on by Dell Inc., have gone to other cities because out-of-towners can’t stay close enough to the convention center.
The Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates it has lost more than 1.6 million room-nights to other destinations because of insufficient inventory.
For more information, read Lyon’s full article here.
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