One of Scotland’s most famous city hotels is set to be marketed to be sold.
Five-star giant the Sheraton Grand Hotel and Spa in Edinburgh is reportedly being “primed for sale” in a top-level move.
The property is at the high end of the hospitality property market that currently has upwards of 150 premises from guesthouses to city centre hotels available.
The React News publication said that the hotel is being “primed for £100 million-plus sale” with an “adviser appointed to offload 270-room asset”. It is a site that sits aside Edinburgh’s financial district and across from the Usher Hall on Lothian Road, providing for the Scottish capital’s tourist and corporate markets.
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Not all the properties are the scale of the Sheraton, which is owned by Marriott, who declined to comment.
The trade list showing 150-ish hotels and motels on the market has changed from 300 this time last year.
The market may be able to settle after some resetting in recent months coming out of the pandemic and away from the autumn mini-Budget mire now a wide range of properties has been bought to market.
The MacDonald Arms Hotel, owned by the same family for 56 years and set on the multicoloured Tobermory waterfront on the Isle of Mull, is hosting a handful of viewings this weekend after it went on the market for £350,000.
The Inn on Loch Lomond, a family-owned hotel that has been trading since 1884 and on the market for offers over £2.5m was sold for an undisclosed sum.
There is also a new £100m plan just lodged with City of Edinburgh Council for a 300-room Ruby Hotel.
So the market seems active at all levels and as the number of hotels available has halved in a year, timing could be important.
Elsewhere this week, energy was in the headlines as earnings at ScottishPower more than doubled in the first three months of 2023 with the group's retail division surging back into profitability, revealed business correspondent Kristy Dorsey.
“The biggest boost for Glasgow-headquartered ScottishPower was the receipt of what is believed to be more than £250m in what are known as ‘backwardation’ payments from Ofgem. This money, paid for by the addition of a ‘backwardation allowance’ to the energy price cap, covers losses suffered last year by all suppliers when the price they were allowed to charge customers was less than the wholesale cost of buying in gas and electricity,” she wrote.
ScottishPower said that “under the energy price cap, extreme market volatility in 2022 forced all UK energy suppliers to buy energy at peak prices but sell to customers at a loss”.
Also this week, business editor Ian McConnell takes a look at new First Minister Humza Yousaf’s performance to date.
“For many in Scottish business wary of Humza Yousaf’s ascension to First Minister, it has surely been a case of so far, so good,” he writes. Adding that “Mr Yousaf’s early moves on business-related matters have been not only swift but significant”.
And finally, what is in a name? Deputy business editor Scott Wright found out when the joint venture between the firms of Mackie’s and Taylors came to an amicable end, with Taylors taking over, which, he writes, “did dictate that Taylors had to find a new name for the product”.
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