hotel construction up nationally in all markets

Despite the challenges of an increasingly tight construction labor market, more hotels are expected to go up in 2020, adding to a stock that has significantly expanded in the last five years.

According to the Henderson, Tennessee-based research firm STR, the number of hotels in construction in just November alone was up by 3.9 percent over the previous November.

The challenge in finding specialized hotel construction workers to take on new projects, contends the news site Skift, can be “traced back to the 2008 recession when hotel companies put the brakes on construction projects, forcing workers to find employment elsewhere.”

There are currently more than 1,700 new hotel projects in the pipeline in North America, with New York seeing the most projects at sixty-three.

Figures crunched in the Tophotelconstruction.com database also show 40 new hotels set for Los Angles, and 37 in metro Atlanta.

Projects in the West include the 1,231-room Sheraton Denver Downtown, which is set to open this summer, and the massive Resort World Las Vegas, with nearly 6,600 rooms, scheduled for completion at the end of this year.
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Indicating that the market for new hotel construction in the West may well be expected to expand in the next few years, STR is also reporting that both Phoenix and Denver experienced the highest increases in occupancy nationally in 2019. 

​By Garry Boulard

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