The hotel market faces a year where much of the CMBS hotel inventory is reaching its maturity and, slow but rising RevPAR has generated optimism for 2011. "It's no secret that prior to the middle of last year, the hotel transactions markets were frozen," he explains. "And the back six months of last year, you saw a loosening up."

Lesser is bullish on the coming market, pointing to a large portion of equity that has been raised which is aimed at the hotel sector. And the maturities will facilitate those. "There's a tremendous amount of debt coming due here in the next 18 to 24 months. The wave is catching all the transaction activity. And that's good and bad transactions, however you want to characterize them."

A spokesman from CB Richard Ellis tells GlobeSt.com, “We wish Dan well in his new endeavors. Scott Biethan, a senior managing director with more 25 years of experience in hospitality real estate, continues to direct the industry’s most robust platform for hotel appraisals & valuations services. We see our practice continuing to grow in 2011 and beyond.”

In fact, albeit unrelated to the Lesser move, CB Richard Ellis recently expanded its west coast hotel operations with six new hires in Seattle, San Francisco and Newport Beach, CA. They added Mark McDermott and Henry Bose Jr. in San Francisco; SVPs Bob Kaplan and Rod Apodaca in Newport Beach; SVP Chris Burdett and associate Matthew Behrens in Seattle.

Disclosure: Daniel Lesser is a frequent contributor to GlobeSt.com.