What's Driving the 'Remarkable' Hotel Boom?

MIAMI—During the September 2015 HVS South Florida Hotel Market Connections (SFHMC) event, one message stood out loud and clear: just when we thought South Florida couldn’t get any hotter, it is. Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach hotels are all celebrating record-breaking years in ADR, occupancy and RevPar. At least that’s how Kathy Conrow, managing director of HVS in Florida, tells it.

“Foreign hotel investors, as well as brokers who attended the SFHMC were intrigued by the astonishingly robust data: annual occupancy for Miami-Dade and Broward counties in 2014 was just shy of 80%, which was 20% higher than the average for the US,” Conrow tells Globest.com. “Hotel occupancy for Palm Beach County ended the year 14% greater than the average for the country. RevPar is not far behind; for the entire state of Florida, the 2014 RevPar was 17% greater than the $74 RevPar achieved by the US hotel industry.”