A growing number of owners who have held on to their luxury New York City hotels through the pain of the past five years have had enough.

Upscale properties, like the New York Edition, The Chatwal and the NoMo SoHo hotel, have all sold for millions less than their owners paid to acquire them in recent months, indicative that a recent uptick in transactions is being driven in part by sellers with few better options.

“There's still distressed debt here in the city,” Hotel Association of New York City President and CEO Vijay Dandapani said. “That's what's prompting these people to just get out and cut their losses.”

The sales market has kicked into gear, with $1.1B of hotel trades since July 1, according to STR data shared with Bisnow. That figure doesn't include Mori Trust's $541M acquisition of 35 Hudson Yards and its 212-room Equinox Hotel, which closed this week five months after Related Cos. and Oxford Properties listed it for $600M.

The dollar volume is more than twice that of the first half of the year and already outpaces the second half of 2024 by 11%, when NYC hotel trades totaled $973M.

The deals are being fueled by investors smelling potential in the city’s best hotels as some owners look for the exit amid high costs and increasingly stringent regulations, industry insiders told Bisnow.

“In some of these trades, we have to think about the larger commercial real estate capital allocation game,” said Jan Freitag, senior vice president of lodging insights for STR. “Maybe we are the belle of the ball right now.”

All but one of the hotels to trade since the start of the third quarter have more than 100 rooms and are classified as luxury, upper upscale or upscale properties. Seven of the 12 hotels sold since July 1 traded for $100M or more.

“I don't know if the sellers are happier with the prices,” CoStar Director of Hospitality Market Analytics Didio Pequeno said. “The buyers, I think, are a little more interested in the prices now.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority sold the 271-room New York Edition at 5 Madison Ave. last month for $235M, a 30% discount from the $336.7M it paid in 2015 and $36M less than the reported asking price when it was listed last year.

The 264-key NoMo SoHo at 9 Crosby St. is being sold out of bankruptcy with an expected price of $125M, roughly 40% less than the Sapir Corp. paid for it in 2015. And Vanbarton Group in August sold the Smyth Tribeca at 85 W. Broadway to Capstone Equities for $39.8M, a 45% price chop.

Forced sales are happening as pressure increases from banks, which are demanding owners either inject new equity or sell the properties to pay off the debt, Freitag said.

One prominent example is The Chatwal, a luxury Midtown hotel whose owner, Dubai businessman Iyer Vaidyanathan Narayan, died last year. The property had been the subject of a foreclosure action from its lender last year, The Real Deal reported. Investor Ben-Josef Group Holdings acquired the 76-key property for $53.2M, compared to the $60M the seller spent in 2014.

Some longtime owners of Manhattan hotels are simply looking to get out of the market rather than swallow the cost of upgrading properties, a typical request of lenders in talks to refinance mortgages, Dandapani said.

“The operating costs are so high that you just [are] not seeing the valuation that you should otherwise have got,” Dandapani said.

A major factor driving costs higher is the Safe Hotels Act, multiple industry sources said. The act, which went into effect in January, requires union labor and direct hiring of roles previously filled by contractors.

But fundamentals in Manhattan’s hotels have improved. In September and October, for the first time since the pandemic, the average revenue per available room in the New York City hotel market was higher than in 2019 after adjusting for inflation, Dandapani said.

Beneath the top-line numbers, the market is being lifted by luxury hotels, which are significantly outperforming the lower-cost lodging options in the city. That dynamic is catching investors’ attention, adding the hotel sector as another area of the economy that’s seeing a K-shaped recovery, Freitag said.

“Luxury has really been the only place to hide for investors,” he said. “We're seeing that the upper end of the market is doing either well or really well, and everybody else everywhere else is not OK.”

Hotel investors also are looking to capitalize on some political tailwinds reducing hotel competition, JLL Senior Director of Hotels and Hospitality Carolina Bernal said.

Local Law 18, a policy known as the “Airbnb ban,” has all but eliminated the short-term rental market in the city. Additionally, developers have been required since 2021 to obtain a special permit from the city to build a new hotel, which has restricted incoming supply.

“We have no new supply, and fundamentals in New York City have never been better,” Eastdil Secured Managing Director Jeff Davis said.

Plus, some owners have taken advantage of a pandemic-era policy cemented into law in 2023 that allows for converting hotels to residential and office, taking more supply offline.

“The supply story in New York is really helping the trajectory of the market,” Bernal said. “Investors are really, really starting to see how well performance is going.”