O’Connor & Associates Hotel Forecast – Randy McCaslin Managing Director of CBRE Hotels Consulting, Speaker

BY RAY HANKAMER
rhankamer@gmail.com

Takeaway: 2014 was a boom year for hotel occupancy in Houston (69%), but in 2015 there was the beginning of the drop in oil prices and the decline in demand (-2.6%). By 2021 occupancies will
have climbed slowly back to 66% barring any unforeseen events. The Super Bowl in the first quarter of 2017 was boon PR-wise for our city, but over the year it will have contributed only nominally to hotel occupancy / revenue.

  • 2016 was the bottom, as demand fell and new supply was coming on stream; 2017 transition year, with gradual return to stabilization over next 4-5 years
  • 2014 had been a stellar year with occupancies about 10 % over traditional levels
  • The new downtown Marriott convention hotel will be a ‘game-changer’ in Houston’s ability to attract future conventions-we now have an attractive number of rooms within 3-4 blocks of the George R. Brown Center
  • 5,200 new hotel rooms will have opened in the CBD by the end of 2017
  • Katy-Westchase-Energy Corridor, NW, and IAH have been hardest hit by lower levels of O & G industry travel

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CCIM Luncheon – Casey Wagner of Walker Parking: The Impact of the Self-Driving Car / Autonomous Vehicle (AV) on Commercial Real Estate

BY RAY HANKAMER
rhankamer@gmail.com

  • Risks associated with AV include insurance, regulations by multiple government agencies, affordability, tech limits for cars, infrastructure limitations/cost, competition from transit, and other
  • Trust in the feature-by-feature addition to today’s cars is slowly increasing, with such features as automatic parallel parking [but as with so many ‘high tech’ gimmicks, who really needs many of them?]
  • “By 2025-2030 most new cars will have fully autonomous features…or maybe by 2040-2060.”

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