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 By Vinnee Tong AP - When urban dwellers think of hotel-condos, they usually imagine sky-high city apartments that come with daily maid service, mints on pillows and the option to order chilled champagne for delivery at any hour.
More often though, hotel-condos are proliferating in midsize and smaller cities across the nation and, in some cases, transforming the places where they're being built. Hotel-condo projects can be found in different stages of development in cities such as Berkeley, Calif.; Provo, Utah; Pittsburgh; and Little Rock, Ark. And they've been proposed for towns as varied as Yankeetown, Fla.; Asheville, N.C.; and West Wendover, Nev. Austin has one such condo-hotel high-rise downtown and a 2nd one planned.
There are 99 luxury condos atop the Hilton Austin in a project called the Five Fifty Five. Units are selling from the upper $300,000s to more than $2 million. Residents have a private entrance off East Fifth Street and access to hotel amenities including 24-hour room service and a pool and fitness center on the eighth floor. Austin-based Ardent Residential has land under contract next to the Four Seasons Hotel, where plans are in the works for a mixed-use tower with 200 to 240 apartments on the lower floors and 70 to 80 condos on the upper levels. Construction could start in the second quarter of 2007. More condo-hotels are being built simply because they make financial sense, experts say. Hotel developers can spread risk to condo owners and earn income from condo sales when projects are finished. In some cases, developers can break even upon completion. Further, condo-hotels by nature are better suited to surviving than a hotel on its own, experts say. "Condo-hotels earn like commercial hotels and appreciate like residential condominiums," said Dante Alexander, the founder of the National Association of Condo Hotel Owners. Condo buyers investing in true hotel-condos often allow hotel management to rent out their units when they're not using them, sharing the revenue. This arrangement makes the most sense in cities that get more traffic from travelers. In certain smaller cities, developers instead build hotels with residential units that aren't rented out. Projects of both types are in development in 31 states throughout the United States. |
