After only being founded last year by a former executive at Goldman Sachs Nick Weber, the property investor Henderson Park already has some very exciting news. It has very recently confirmed that it will acquire two of the UK’s biggest hotels. It is said that the deal comes to a total of around £500 million.
The property investor has snapped up the Hilton Birmingham Metropole and the Hilton London Metropole, which is the first time Henderson Park has dealt in UK hotels. Edward Wojakovski, the famous property mogul, sold the two properties through his Tonstate property group. This deal now takes the the investor’s total assets to a very impressive £1 billion ($1.3 billion). When Tonstate bought the hotels, back in 2006 from the Hilton group, they paid £417 million for the pair.
The Hilton London Metropole is the second-largest London hotel when it comes to room count. It comes in at 1,059 rooms. Not only that, though, but it is one of the biggest conference hotels in the city and is one of the Hilton’s flagship London hotels. Slightly smaller at just 790 rooms, the Birmingham hotel is still the UK’s largest hotel outside of London. When it comes to looking at delegate capacity, the Birmingham hotel is the largest conference hotel in the whole country.
Nick Weber is well known for his investments in the hotel industry, as he bought and sold the recognisable Jury’s Inn chain for around £680 million in 2015. Many believe that the particular deal brought him about 3.25x in equity return.
His newly founded Henderson Park investment platform also has a strong track record in the hotel industry, even though it was only created last year. One of the investor’s previous deals was buying the largest hotel in Paris – the Le Méridien Étoile. The hotel was bought for £329 million (€365 million). Henderson Park also bought the prestigious 5-star Athens hotel The Ledra.
Weber is obviously very excited about introducing these two new hotels to Henderson Park’s portfolio and has stated that he is thrilled his investment company has now entered the UK hotel industry. The Henderson Park portfolio now features these eminent landscape assets of substantial scale in very prominent locations in the UK’s two prime cities. Plus, they each offer various ways in which they could be made even more profitable, which is something that Weber is excited to explore.
Even though Henderson Park now owns the Hilton London Metropole and the Hilton Birmingham Metropole, they hotels will continue to be operated by the Hilton company. However, it is believed that the investor’s asset management team will take care of both hotels’ long term profitability.
It’s exciting to see where these two new assets will take Weber’s Henderson Park’s investment portfolio. There is no doubt that most of the investment world, especially those experts who work in the hotel industry, will eagerly watch how these assets progress over the coming years. And we will eventually see whether this move into UK hotels was ultimately worth it.
Jenny has been reporting on small business issues since 2001 where she held a number of freelance positions across the leading SME publications in the UK. Specialist subjects included SME financing and tax.