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The Valley of the Sun's hospitality market continues to shine.
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THE PULSE: Phoenix's torrid growth is slowing some, but development activity in its hospitality market remains relatively robust. The market has the nation's third-largest hotel development pipeline at 19,864 rooms, according to Lodging Econometrics. And the city's downtown recently experienced its first hotel opening since 1976, when a 1,000-room Sheraton made its debut. That 31-story development is poised to benefit from the renovation/expansion of the city's convention center, including a 310,000-square-foot exhibit hall that's scheduled to open this month. Resorts and casinos continue to crop up in the region, to cater to visitors attracted by its sunny clime (300-plus cloudless days a year) and comfortable winter temperatures. A couple of notable examples: the recently opened InterContinental Montelucia Resort & Spa in Paradise Valley, and the Casino Arizona Resort & Spa in Salt River that's slated to open in early 2010.
THE HOT SPOTS: Tempe, which sits just southeast of Phoenix, is set to get several new hotels within the next couple of years. The high interest in that market is reflected in Starwood Hotel's development pipeline for metropolitan Phoenix: Of the six new hotels it plans there during the next couple years, three (an Aloft, an Element and a Westin) will be in Tempe. A Marriott Residence Inn and a Hyatt Regency are also in the works there. Other submarkets experiencing hospitality-related construction are Chandler and Glendale. Downtown, meantime, there's a wait-and-see attitude. While at least three other hotel projects are on the drawing boards for the city's center, The Arizona Republic newspaper reports developers want to see how the expanded convention center impacts room demand before deciding whether to proceed.
THE NUMBERS: Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the U.S., with a population of about 1.5 million, and the 13th-largest metro area in the country, with roughly 4.3 million residents. While the region's population growth is expected to slow some from the red-hot pace of earlier this decade, it is still expected to see an ongoing influx of new residents.
THE OUTLOOK: The credit crunch and corresponding development slowdown of recent months have made their presence felt in Phoenix. Case in point: The opening of the Hotel Monroe-a $100 million luxury boutique hotel once set for this past fall in downtown Phoenix-is now on hold, after its construction funding became mired in the collapse of its lender. But Kasia Kowalczyk, an associate with hotel valuation and consulting firm HVS, says the downturn will only slow-not halt-the region's growth. "The city of Phoenix has made and received considerable monetary investments in an effort to be recognized as a critical epicenter of the educational, convention, finance and tourism industries, and those efforts should prove to have long-lasting, positive impacts on the area," she says.
WORD TO THE WISE: Don't refer to downtown Phoenix as "Copper Square." After promoting a 90-block area in the city's core under that name for eight years, the business partnership behind that effort scrapped it late last year, conceding it had never caught on.
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