LOS ANGELES Maritz, Wolff & Co., owner of eight hotels including The Carlyle in New York City and a 50% stake in Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, has gone into selling mode, even as most of the rest of the industry views the current landscape as an opportune time.
“We don’t have any of the pressure that public companies have,” Lew Wolff, the firm’s 76-year-old principal, tells Bloomberg. “We have time to find legitimate buyers at a price we wouldn’t necessarily pay ourselves. That makes it a good deal.”
Wolff, who is also chairman of Sunstone Hotel Investors Inc. and is a co-owner of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, is known as a contrarian investor, as is his business partner, Flip Maritz. “Lew and I would rather zig when others are zagging,” Maritz tells Bloomberg. “There are so many buyers, REITs or pension funds that are looking to deploy money. We’d rather be the sellers at this point than the buyers.”
Maritz Wolff has a total return target of US$1.8 billion by about 2015, which would mark a return of 3.2 times the original investment.
Any of the firm’s eight properties are available for the right price. “I have no emotional ties to any property,” Wolff says. “They are inanimate objects. That’s the only way we can be fair to our long-term investors who trust us to do what’s best.”
The firm’s portfolio is comprised of:
- The Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis, Missouri
- Four Seasons Hotel Houston
- The Carlyle, New York City
- Rosewood Little Dix Bay, Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands
- Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, Dallas
- The Fairmont San Francisco
- The Fairmont San Jose, California
- Inn of the Anasazi, Santa Fe, New Mexico