Thursday, October 19, 2006

It's a hot hotel market downtown
Two new projects adding hundreds of rooms, condos

Seattle is getting two new hotels, one of them a "luxury, eco-friendly" facility that claims to be the first of its kind in the world. Both projects point to a hot local hotel market.

Starwood Capital Group announced Wednesday a new hotel brand, called "1," that will be built on green construction principles. A prominent national environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, will be the hotel's environmental adviser.

The first "1" will be built at Second Avenue and Pine Street and is expected to open in late 2008. It will feature 110 hotel rooms, 91 condominiums and seven penthouses. It will donate 1 percent of revenue to environmental organizations.

"As a CEO and parent of three young children, I have grown acutely aware of the personal responsibility we each have to help preserve and protect our planet, which can only happen through the accumulation of small efforts by millions of individuals," said Barry Sternlicht, who leads the Greenwich, Conn.-based group.

Similar hotels are planned for Paris; Scottsdale, Ariz.; Mammoth Lakes, Calif.; and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The company hopes to build at least 15 of the hotels in global resorts and in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Construction on another Seattle hotel project, the Denny Way Hyatt Hotel & Condominium Towers, should start in the first quarter of 2007, said Ariel Development, a developer on the project.

Located within walking distance of the Seattle Center at Denny Way and Sixth Avenue, the Hyatt will feature 158 rooms and 57 condos, according to the developer's Web site.

Seattle's hotel industry is seeing rapid growth. Normally, a new hotel is built every other year, but several hotels are in construction or in the permit process downtown, said Chris Burdett, senior vice president at Colliers International Hotels, an investment advisory counselor for the hospitality industry.

Over the next three years, almost 3,000 new rooms are scheduled to open in Seattle's core, he said.

"That is unusual," Burdett said. "I think this market has the ability to absorb all those rooms."

The Seattle metropolitan area has about 31,000 hotel rooms, with about one-third, or 10,000 of them, downtown, according to Seattle's Convention and Visitors Bureau.

"We're a hot hotel market; hotels want to be here," said bureau spokesman David Blandford.

P-I reporter Andrea James can be reached at 206-448-8124 or andreajames@seattlepi.com