The Acquisition Opportunities Outside of the Gateway Markets panel discuss the current market challenges. The Acquisition Opportunities Outside of the Gateway Markets panel discuss the current market challenges.

LOS ANGELES—“I think the peak was in the third quarter of 2014,” Teague Hunter said at ALIS this week. He was talking on the Acquisition Opportunities Outside of Gateway Markets panel, along with Colin Carroll, VP of investments at Ashford; Neil Freeman, chairman and CEO of Aries Capital; Akshay Goyal, VP at Starwood Capital; and Mark K. Owens, EVP and head of hospitality capital markets at CBRE. As Hunter explains, the floating rate market in 3Q14 shutdown and that is where he marks the peak. Today, he says, the spreads have widened, leaving a gap between buyers and sellers on pricing and that is also indicative of a post-peak market.

Owens disagreed, saying that the floating rate market is back today, and that there is plenty of debt available. “For the right borrower, I don't think this is as dismal of a market as everyone seems to think it is,” he said on the panel. Carroll also said that he isn't willing to say that the peak hit in 2014, but he did wonder what the major Blackstone acquisition deals completed that year would look like today. For the most part, a lot of the major REITs have shut down. While Goyal admitted, “For large deals, it is more difficult today than in 2014.”

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Kelsi Maree Borland

Kelsi Maree Borland is a freelance journalist and magazine writer based in Los Angeles, California. For more than 5 years, she has extensively reported on the commercial real estate industry, covering major deals across all commercial asset classes, investment strategy and capital markets trends, market commentary, economic trends and new technologies disrupting and revolutionizing the industry. Her work appears daily on GlobeSt.com and regularly in Real Estate Forum Magazine. As a magazine writer, she covers lifestyle and travel trends. Her work has appeared in Angeleno, Los Angeles Magazine, Travel and Leisure and more.