Richmond’s 98-room Tudor-style Best Western Plus Abercorn Inn has new owners, Macdonald Commercial Real Estate Services Ltd. broker Cynthia Dong confirmed March 22.
She would not disclose how much the buyer, Abercorn Inns (2012) Ltd., paid for the property but said that the purchase demonstrated confidence in the region and the sector.
“In terms of new infrastructure and development, there’s a lot going on in Richmond now and the Abercorn Inn is well positioned to take advantage of all this activity,” she said.
Richmond has 25 hotels with a total of 4920 rooms.
Few hotels sell in Metro Vancouver each year.
There were only four such sales with a value more than $1 million in 2012, according to RealNet Canada Inc.
That was an average year given that in the past five years, there have been 21 such sales.
Former Richmond chief planner Brian Jackson last year spoke at length about how tight the Richmond hotel market is.
He originally projected that developers were set to build 16 hotels with a total of 2,500 rooms within 20 years. Jackson, who is now general manager of planning and development at the City of Vancouver, then revised that to 15 hotels with 2,000 rooms.
Aberdeen Centre owner Thomas Fung, however, doubted that Richmond could sustain so many new hotels.
"Originally we were going to put a hotel in our development [in the third phase of Aberdeen Centre], but I realized that with 16 hotels potentially coming up in Richmond there will be an oversupply," Fung told Business in Vancouver last year.
