Gencom's Karim Alibhai Looks West After $1B East Coast Buying Spree
Hospitality-focused investment and development firm Gencom has spent more than $1B on acquiring five luxury hotels in New York and Miami over the past two years. It has no plans to slow down.
Gencom founder and principal Karim Alibhai told Bisnow on Wednesday he is searching for acquisition targets in California, where multiple high-profile properties are changing hands through distressed sales.
"We continue to be an opportunistic buyer," he said in an interview between panels at the Advisory, Lodging and Investment Summit for the Caribbean and Latin America in Coral Gables, Florida.
"We're looking at the West Coast, since that's been distressed, and there's some opportunities there," Alibhai added. "That's sort of our main focus."
The pursuit is a shift in momentum after the Miami-based firm has been among the East Coast's most active buyers of luxury hotels.
Gencom has been on a buying spree, specifically of Ritz-Carlton hotels. It acquired full control of the Marriott luxury brand's Key Biscayne location for more than $400M in 2024 and is spending more than $100M on renovating the lobby, rooms and spa of the hotel that Alibhai developed more than two decades prior.
The company bought back the majority stake of the Ritz-Carlton Coconut Grove in January and plans to spend nearly $50M to renovate the property, Alibhai told Bisnow.
Most recently, Gencom purchased the 253-room Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park in February for $320M. That followed its $300M acquisition of the 587-key Thompson Central Park at the end of 2024 and its $230M joint venture to buy the 607-key InterContinental New York Times Square in December.
While luxury hotels have been able to drive room rates and maintain growing revenue per available room, many owners have been unable to reinvest in their properties since the pandemic because of higher interest rates.
"You can have these situations that are distressed because they're just not positioned right," Alibhai said onstage at the ALIS conference. "They're not managed to its fullest potential, they're starved for [capital expenditures]."
"We always look for those situations, which lets us essentially invest across capital cycles," he added.
The company plans to spend $40M on renovating the Ritz-Carlton Central Park and reconceptualizing the food and beverage, Alibhai told Bisnow.
Globally, the firm is looking at London, Marbella, Spain, and Portugal, said Alibhai, who at the ALIS conference accepted the Development of the Year award with The Athens Group for the Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve property they delivered in Peninsula Papagayo, Costa Rica, in February 2025.
Gencom's push to buy and renovate comes at a turning point for the luxury and upscale hotel market, which has consistently outperformed other hotel markets in occupancy levels and average daily rates.
Luxury's occupancy levels grew about 2% and their average daily rate roughly 5% in the first quarter of 2026, the fastest of any hotel segment, according to CoStar.
That stands in stark contrast to hotels that cater to middle- and working-class travelers, which are feeling the squeeze of higher gas prices — rates were down year-over-year in the economy and midscale segments.
Slower travel remains a looming threat to every band of the hotel market. Amid a tightening in visa requirements and a crackdown on what nationals from countries can enter the country, international travel fell 5.5% last year, according to a report by the World Travel & Tourism Council.
"U.S. international travel, unfortunately, is one of the lowest. [It] dropped significantly because of some of the policies and how difficult it is," Alibhai said. "I think all that, hopefully, can only go up once they improve things."
"But the domestic market is traveling more locally, so that's kind of helped cushion the blow."
