BEVERLY HILLS—The Wanda Group is proposing to add a luxury hotel to their planned $1 billion condominium development in a prime Beverly Hills location.
To make room for the hotel, 42 planned residences would be eliminated in favor of the 134-room hotel. The hotel would feature a guest-only spa and rooftop pool, as well as public restaurants on the ground floor and roof.
The project, now being called One Beverly Hills, is located at 9900 Wilshire Boulevard, right next to the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Just a little further down, a new Waldorf Astoria is under construction at the triangular corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire.
Beverly Hills can successfully accommodate this kind of next-door competition for luxury hotels, PFK Consulting’s Bruce Baltin told the Los Angeles Times.
According to statistics from PKF, Beverly Hills’ biggest hotels charged an average of $453 a night and were almost 80 percent occupied last year.
“L.A. is getting to be more of a world city and getting more international business,” Baltin said. “Our rates are reasonable compared to the rest of the world.”
Before One Beverly Hills can get a slice of the hotel market, the developers will need to get approval from city officials. While condo development on the site has been approved for a decade, introducing a hotel into the mix requires new permits.
The Wanda Group and their partner, the Athens Group, are optimistic about their chances for approval. They hope that the public revenue from taxation on hotel guests will provide an incentive to green light the project. The change would increase tax revenue by an estimated nearly $3 million.
If the Wanda Group can obtain permission to go ahead with their altered plans within 18 months, they will begin construction in early 2017. Construction is projected to take at least two years.
