New England Hotel Portfolio Sells for $100M

WELLESLEY, MA-A quintet of lodging properties owned by Fine Hotels Corp. has been acquired by a joint venture partnership for approximately $100 million. The purchase by Linchris Hotel Corp. of Hanover and Chicago-based Strategic Capital Partners includes three Massachusetts properties, the most prominent being the Holiday Inn Brookline, a 225-room hotel that fetched $35.5 million. The two-state transaction closed on Friday.

Fine divested the 227-room Hampton Inn Boston Logan Airport in Revere and a 202-room Holiday Inn and conference center in Mansfield. Fine’s Comfort Inn and a Holiday Inn in Augusta, ME, are also part of the 855-key portfolio, which the company assembled during nearly two decades as a developer, investor and manager in the lodging industry. The company’s hotel holdings once stretched beyond New England down the East Coast, but assets have been pared for a variety of reasons in recent years. Holiday Inns in Boxborough, Newton and Worcester were sold; the 178-room Ramada Rolling Green hotel in Andover was shuttered in 2002 after a wave of room construction saturated the Merrimack Valley; and the lender took back a Sturbridge operation in 2006. Fine Hotels was founded in 1990 by Gerald Fineberg. The company did not return phone calls by press deadline.

Linchris and Strategic are financing their purchase through Anglo-Irish Bank Corp, which provided a $64.5-million note. The Revere Hampton Inn sold for $38.6 million, while the Mansfield asset traded for $9 million. Pricing for the two Maine hotels was not available, but sources put the overall portfolio figure at approximately $100 million. The Augusta Comfort Inn has 99 rooms, while the Holiday Inn has 102 units. They are located within a mile of each other just off Interstate 95 near the Augusta Civic Center in central Maine.