DENVER — Continuing its aggressive expansion program, Value Place LLC has announced plans to develop nine new extended stay hotels in the Denver area with construction to start in early 2014. The company is working with Denver-based broker Steve Markey of David, Hicks & Lampert to explore possible sites and talk with landowners, brokers and commercial real estate firms.
Value Place plans to invest more than $63 million to build the nine company-owned hotels, including about $13 million for land acquisition.
“While many other hotel companies have stopped building new hotels, we are doing exactly the opposite,” says David Redfern, president of real estate development for Wichita, Kan.-based Value Place. “We don't go into a market and reflag an older hotel, or upgrade and rebrand it. We build every Value Place from the ground up to very exacting standards.”
Why Denver?
With the help of the Highland Research Group, a specialist in extended stay hotels, Value Place studied 64 markets across the United States for new development opportunities, explains Redfern. Denver ranked at the top of this list due to increasing demand for Value Place and a limited amount of supply or competition.
Value Place intends to build the nine hotels in Denver in 2014 and 2015. “We are equipped to go very fast if we can find the right nine locations,” emphasizes Redfern. “In a best-case scenario, we could build them all in 2014. It will help to have two-acre sites that are zoned for hotel use.”
Founded by extended-stay pioneer and entrepreneur Jack DeBoer in 2002, Value Place currently operates 184 hotels in 32 states, including four in Colorado, making it the largest economy extended stay lodging brand in the United States.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, DeBoer created and developed lodging brands Residence Inn, Summerfield Suites and Candlewood Suites. Prior to that period, DeBoer developed apartments beginning in the 1960s. By 1973, his company had built more than 16,000 apartments in 30 cities across 25 states.
The Value Place brand, which offers short-term housing at affordable weekly rates, combines the conveniences of a hotel with apartment essentials, according to the company’s web site.
Each unit features a kitchen with a full-size refrigerator and freezer, a two-burner stovetop, microwave, living room/bedroom furnishings and an onsite, coin-operated laundry room. Housekeeping is included every other week. Additional cleaning is available for $25 per service. A la carte amenities also are offered.
“Our customer is the traveler staying more than three nights who needs affordable, new, clean, and safe accommodations,” says Redfern. “This can be the small business owner traveling into Denver for a project, or a retired couple traveling through the Western United States.”
Typically, Value Place hotels are built near highways, freeways or major intersections. The company will consider sites that meet the following requirements:
• frontage to highways or thoroughfares with daily traffic of more than 50,000, including local and out-of-town traffic;
• a strong mix and dispersion of non-retail employers with more than 150 local employees;
• a one-mile population of at least 5,000 and a five-mile population of at least 100,000.
Value Place also plans to acquire land and build company-owned hotels in other metro markets during the next three years, including Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Miami and southeast Florida.
— Matt Valley