Like so many people, Alan Reay can’t wait to check back in.

Reay is President and Founder of Atlas Hospitality Group, an Irvine-based California hotel sales broker. In the year since the COVID-19 outbreak, his travel plans have been changed, and trips and conferences have been canceled or suspended.

After several decades as a top hotel broker, the Briton who calls Newport Beach home founded the Atlas Hospitality Group in 1996. The company also consults and collects data on hotel sales in California (which increased slightly by 0.3% from 2019 over the past year). more than any other state) and building a new hotel.

“I think the last business trip I took was to San Francisco and that was in September last year,” said Reay. “We’ll probably be going to Maui in May, and hopefully that’s still going.”

Work or pleasure?

“Maui is for pleasure,” he said over the phone. “Though when you’re in the hotel industry, you’re always looking for hotels.”

So we asked him about them.

Q: The pandemic has hit the hospitality industry. Have you seen anything like this before?

A: I’ve gone through a number of these downturns and we’ve never had a situation where the entire industry stalled and closed. On the positive side, the interest we are now receiving from buyers is incredible. In some ways, it’s like COVID never happened.

Q: Who are these buyers?

A: They are buyers who are already California residents. Also, I’ve received more calls from out of state buyers in the past two months than in the past 20 years. That’s unusual because I hear people want to leave California because of taxes and everything else.

I tell them, “Why do you want to buy in California?”

They all say the same thing: barriers to entry. It’s expensive to build a hotel here. Each of them says, “I want to buy in California, especially along the coast, because there is no more land to build on. It is practically impossible to get a permit, which means I can increase my prices. I will make a lot of money. ‘

Q: Your survey of hotel sales in California at the end of 2020 shows that Southern California had more sales than the northern half of the state. What does it explain?

A: The only thing that has really emerged from this pandemic is the markets that have held up, these drive-to markets. We see more of those in Southern California in La Jolla, Coronado, Santa Monica – the beach towns – and San Luis Obispo and places like that.

San Jose and San Francisco have historically been the real leaders in terms of occupancy and average daily rate. This has hurt these markets the most because international tourism has completely shrunk, if not gone. Coupled with the complete shutdown of the Convention business, this has really decimated markets like San Francisco and San Jose.

I’ll tell you that since the vaccine was announced, there has been an increasing interest in taking over the hotels.

Q: Will room rates go up when cities reopen?

A: I think this is going to be a story of two markets. For hotels that are in transit markets or somewhere along the coast because they are not allowed to fly internationally and because once we are fully open people want to get off, I think the law of supply of demand will drive prices up will drift. In fact, I have a number of clients who own Catalina hotels who had record sales even in October and November.

However, if you’re going to San Francisco, or Anaheim, or downtown Los Angeles and staying in a 300 or 400 room Ritz-Carlton or JW Marriott, you’ll find these hotels at least soon term really aggressive on their pricing.

Q: How do hotels create safe spaces?

A: I’m going to digress a bit because historically the motels you would see by the roadside with the two story exterior corridor were basically seen in the hospitality industry as a bit dated. None of the big franchises wanted them.

One of the positive effects of COVID is that the hotels that were basically written off have made a very, very strong comeback. You can drive up. You can enter your room without going to the reception. You don’t have to check in. Lots of owners go in and make it hip and boutique.

Many logs are managed by the big franchises – Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott, Intercontinental Hotels, Wyndham, Choice – because this is very important. Most of these hotels offer a free breakfast buffet. That fell by the wayside because you have to be very, very careful with COVID.

In San Francisco, the union that represents hotel workers wanted to mandate multiple cleanings per room per day, which, quite frankly, would make hotels impossible. The operation would be far too expensive. They’ve since scaled that down, but you have them implemented, if someone stays in a room it has to stay empty for 48 hours.

So there are still a lot of controls in place to get the hotel up and running. But I’m not sure this will change the way hotels work. In fact, one of the most important things hotels were moving towards was getting smaller rooms and leaving the rooms to the lobby using their laptop and their belongings and everything else. It’s already designed, it’s already built. It’s impossible to handle that.

Besides being sure it is safe, we will likely see a return that is slowly but surely returning to normal hotel operations.

Q: when?

A: Again, this will all have to do with the vaccinations and how quickly we can get out.

If this continues for a long time, sites like Trip Advisor will rate hotels for cleanliness and measures to keep COVID at bay. It will be a game changer for hotels.

Meet Alan Reay

Title: president

Companies: Atlas Hospitality Group

Hometown: Newport Beach

Education: Bachelor’s degree in Business from Kingston University in Surrey, England.

Previous knowledge: Spent several decades in the hotel industry and brokerage of investment properties before founding his own company in 1997.

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