JLL's Hotels & Hospitality group arranged $575 million in financing for the Diplomat Beach Resort, a beachfront resort with 1,000 guestrooms in Hollywood, Fla.
JLL worked on behalf of the borrower, a joint venture between real estate funds managed by Trinity Investments and funds managed by UBS Asset Management's Real Estate & Private Markets Multi-Managers business, to secure the five-year, floating-rate loan through mortgage lenders, Citi and Deutsche Bank. The interest-only loan also included mezzanine financing provide by Ohana Real Estate Investors and Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board.
JLL was also involved in the 2023 sale of the resort to Trinity and funds advised by UBS Asset Management, which represented the third largest single-asset hotel sale ever in the U.S. at the time. The south Florida lodging industry saw a tremendous recovery post-Covid making it one of the best-performing hotel markets in the country, benefitting significantly from an increase in leisure travel, recovery of group demand and the significant demographic shift into South Florida. According to JLL's State of the Florida Lodging Industry report, revenue per available room in each of the state's top 10 lodging markets beat the U.S. average in 2023.
The Diplomat Beach Resort is currently managed by Hilton Hotels and Resorts under the Curio Collection by Hilton brand. Extensively renovated and repositioned through a comprehensive $90 million dollar capital plan in 2018, the Diplomat Beach Resort is a beachfront meeting and events-focused resort. The resort has 1,000 guestrooms and suites and over 200,000-square-feet of integrated meeting and events space. The property consists of a twin-spired, 36-story tower containing the hotel rooms, a 15,000-square-foot spa, six restaurants and bars plus multiple pools and cascading waterfalls. The property is situated on 10 acres of Atlantic Ocean beachfront.