MIAMI-The Miami office of Holliday Fenoglio Fowler is marketing a portfolio of three Courtyard by Marriott hotels in San Jose, Costa Rica, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and Port of Spain, Trinidad. These properties are doing well, says Dan Carlo, senior managing director at HFF’s Miami office. Their collective RevPAR is 50% higher than the brand-name average for the over 850 Courtyard Hotels, he says.

“It is an institutional investment group from the Northeast that is selling the hotels,” says, Carlo. “They bought them at a good price and now see this as an opportunity to harvest their gains. We’ve had tremendous success in financing properties in the last 90 days in Houston, Nashville and Indianapolis, because the debt markets are back considerably,” he says.

Carlo says that this is a good time to market hotels because the sector is beginning to recover. According to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers May 2010 report called “Hospitality & Leisure: Hospitality Directions US,” hotel occupancy rates should increase by 3.5% in 2010 resulting in a 1.8% increase in RevPar, the first annual increase in this metric since 2007.