The 196-room
Renaissance Milwaukee West Hotel has been listed for sale, five years after opening.
Located just outside of Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa, the hotel opened in August 2020 and marked the first Renaissance-branded property in the state. Currently owned by Atlanta-based
Concord Hospitality, the hotel was listed for sale earlier this month by
Hunter Hotel Advisors, also based in Atlanta.
The listing for the hotel does not include a sale price, but says the hotel is being offered at a “significant discount to today’s replacement cost.” The property had a 2024 assessed value of $24 million and a fair market value of $35 million, according to Milwaukee County records.
Developed by Milwaukee’s
HKS Holdings, the hotel includes amenities such as the ELDR+RIME Restaurant, the Silhouette Lobby Lounge and over 9,000 square feet of meeting and event space.
The listing attributes the hotel’s primary demand driver to the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center and describes the surrounding area as a “high-barrier-to-entry submarket” with no new hotel supply within a five-mile radius, which hotel industry analysts said could make it an attractive investment.
"It should be a very enticing property for someone, as long as it's producing the revenue to support the price," said
Greg Hanis, president of Fort Myers, Florida-based
Hospitality Marketers International Inc., which was previously based in New Berlin.
Still, Hanis said a hotel being sold at just five years old is “unusual,” but is a trend he's seen lately amid sluggish demand for hotels.
“I'm seeing a lot of lot of name brand hotels that are relatively new, within 10 years old, that are coming up on the market for sale,” Hanis said, adding that he'd expect hotels to be 15 years or older before being sold. “…Corporate travel has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, so tourists have been keeping a lot of hotels occupied, but tourism is even slowing down these days because people are worried about the economy.”
Hanis said he’s seen a significant increase in hotels of any age being listed for sale recently, which could also be in indicator that hotel owners don't have an optimistic view of the market, he said.
Hotels generally stabilize within a few years of opening, but Hanis noted that this property likely had a slow start after opening in 2020, when travel demand was at its lowest. He also said hotel brands often begin requiring property upgrades after about five to seven years, which could influence an owner’s decision to sell.
Doug Nysse, hospitality industry advisor and director of project and development services with
Colliers | Wisconsin, agreed that the Renaissance’s stabilization could’ve taken longer, but said it wasn’t unusual for owners and investors to put a property up for sale at this point in its life. Nysse added that it’s difficult to guess the motivation for selling without a list price.
Concord Hospitality, which owns hotel properties nationally, did not respond to requests for comment.
