On Dec. 19, we'll be holding our third annual SoCal Hospitality Summit, and our LA reporter caught up with two of our panelists beforehand. Sonnenblick Development chairman Bob Sonnenblick (looking festive at the Marina Del Rey boat parade) is breaking ground in Q2 on the USC Hyatt House, a $75M, 200-key hotel on the USC Medical Center campus. He's also building a $40M Hyatt Place inside the new terminal at Sacramento International Airport. And Bob's got other projects in the hopper, including a 330-room Loews in Cathedral City and a 335-room resort in Pinehurst, NC. He's actively looking for land for additional hotels, especially waterfront sites in the LA area.

CBRE SVP Rod Apodaca (snapped at last year's Summit) says the rebounding hotel market continues to show strong numbers, and it makes sense to invest in new construction. He's seeing development from LA County down to San Diego. Case in point: China's Shanghai Greenland is under construction on the Metropolis site in South Park, which it bought from IDS. In addition, Rod has a number of deals under contract from California to Arizona, including ultra-luxury product. Given high asking prices for land, he notes, the difficulty is finding available product. (We feel the same way when we lose the hotel pieces in Monopoly.)