The “challenges” for San Francisco’s biggest business are coming thick and fast. That oft-used word at last Tuesday’s San Francisco Visitors & Convention Bureau luncheon rang loud and clear two days later when the Four Seasons Hotel on Market Street defaulted on a $90 million loan. Those who might have forgotten were reminded that Nob Hill’s famed Stanford Court Hotel had gone into receivership two weeks earlier, owing $89 million after its new owners bought the place for $93 million two years ago and spent $32 million in renovations.
There’s a wave of hotel defaults and foreclosures sweeping up and down California. Currently, 32 hotels are in foreclosure and 174 in default statewide.
Opportunity costs: That presumably is what Hong Kong’s Keck Seng Investments Ltd. saw when it agreed to buy the San Francisco W last week for $90 million. As The Chronicle’s James Temple pointed out, the price represents a 50 percent drop from peak values two years ago. The seller, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., which owns numerous hotels in the Bay Area, including the recently opened four-star Rosewood Sand Hill in Silicon Valley, said the sale is one of those the company “is pursuing to further reduce its debt levels.”
