The Hilton hotel in Prague, in which former US President Barack Obama or his predecessors Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have stayed, is being sold by IBRC, the investment structure of the Irish bank NAMA, dealing with debt settlement, reports E15.cz. At the same time, the domestic business elite has been competing with multinational investment capital for the largest Czech hotel.
The sale is the result of the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank, in which the hotel's former owner, Irish real estate magnate Seán Quinn, held a stake.
There is no other similar hotel in Prague. The Prague Hilton has eight hundred rooms and over 7.000 sqm of conference space, which makes it the second busiest congress venue in the Czech Republic. It has been for sale for a few months now and the whole process is getting closer to choosing a buyer at the end of the year. According to e15, the price could be around €300 million, i.e. around CZK 7.5 billion. Two years ago, the consulting company CBRE valued the hotel at €250 million.
The richest Czech Renata Kellnerová, owner of the PPF group and the family holding Amalar, submitted an offer. According to several e15 sources, Luděk Sekyra, the owner of the developer Sekyra Group also submitted an offer for the Czech hotel number one. Sekyra did not want to comment on the current process of selling the hotel, but according to e15, it is also interested in the hotel because of the surrounding land where new office buildings could be built. According to e15, investment funds have also shown interest in the Prague Hilton. The first of them is the American company Blackstone, which eight years ago sold the second Prague Hilton near Masaryk station to the Singaporean real estate investment platform M&L Hospitality Trust. The second bidder is the American asset manager Ares Capital Corporation. It is therefore obvious that the Prague Hilton has already reached such a size that major players from abroad are interested in it, despite the current reluctance of international capital to invest in the Czech Republic, especially due to the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The sale is handled by CBRE, a consulting company that did not comment on the transaction. The head of CBRE's European hotel division, Kenneth Hatton, only said that the European congress market in particular currently offers a good opportunity to meet the high demand.
Photo: VitVit /commons.wikimedia.org
