Podcast: Real Estate Forums

COVID-19 and Hotels with Alam Pirani of Colliers International Hotels

Alam Pirani brings his 29 years of hotel experience to the podcast to talk about his favourite asset class. He is the Executive Managing Director of Colliers International Hotels. A new area of discussion for the podcast, Alam will talk about the history of the asset class and the effects it is feeling from COVID-19.

Alam begins by discussing what makes hotels different from any other asset class and the types of investors they attract. He fields questions about why hotels have become a legitimized asset class in recent years and how the industry is dealing with low occupancy rates brought on by COVID-19.

Topics covered include:

What Alam’s 29-year career with Colliers has been like.
Colliers’ management team respecting that hotels are a unique asset class.
A breakdown of the subsets in this asset class.
Companies that franchise and manage hotels.
How interest levels from investors vary depending on the type of hotel.
Cap rates in the hotel industry before the COVID-19 pandemic, along with other metrics.
Investment activity over the past ten years into this asset class.
Three factors that have legitimized hotels as investments.Institutional investors getting involved with hotels.
The life cycle of hotel common areas and how often they need to be updated.
How the hotel industry is competing with services like Airbnb.
What Alam has been seeing regarding hotel response to COVID-19.
Occupancy levels now compared to the same time last year.
Comparing the impact of COVID-19 to that of SARS.
Factors that encourage people to travel domestically.
Good news for hotels coming over the next two years.

More about our guest:

Alam Pirani is Executive Managing Director of Colliers International Hotels based in the Toronto office. He leads the team of professionals responsible for hotel investment advisory services in Canada and the Caribbean and is an Executive Member of the Colliers Global Hotel Team.

Alam’s specialized experience is in sourcing equity and debt capital for hotel and leisure investments and providing strategic advisory services for hotel and leisure-related assets. Since joining Colliers in 1991, Alam has been directly involved in portfolio and single asset and debt transactions with a market capitalization of over $10.0 billion in Canada and over $3.0 billion in the Caribbean acting on behalf of REIT’s, public companies, institutional investors, opportunity/investment funds and private capital sources.

Released: May 15, 2020