Downtown Detroit may not only be seeing a strong demand for residential housing. Hotel rooms are also a hot commodity in Detroit, according to USA Today.
Read the full story: Detroit’s bust, but its hotel industry is booming
Before naming hotel occupancy rates, USA Today points to several several developments to illustrate this: the $290 renovation of the Cobo Center, the 25-floor, 367-room Crown Plaza Detroit Downtown Contention Center that opened this month, and Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert’s general investment in the city.
It also notes that “three casino hotels have opened in recent years,” and a new Starwood Aloft hotel is set to open next year in the redeveloped David Whitney Building.
The publication quotes hotel occupancy rates that put the Motor City in line with the national average:
“Hotel occupancy rates in the metropolitan Detroit area have gone from 47.5% in 2009, when General Motors and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy protection, to 61.3% so far this year, according to hotel industry tracking firm STR. That’s in line with the national average.
Last month, hotel occupancy levels reached 70.3%.”
Contrast that to the last decade, when Detroit had one of the worst hotel markets in the U.S., C. Patrick Scholes, a managing director at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, tells USA Today.
It is not only downtown that is seeing more rooms coming online. USA Today reports that as of June, there were 824 hotel rooms under construction throughout metro Detroit, including places such as the soon-to-open Hyatt Park Place in Novi. There were a total of 41,286 rooms in the metro area at the end of June.
