By: Property Week
**By Guy Montague-Jones**
Queensgate Investments has swooped to buy the Holiday Inn London Kensington Forum, the fifth-largest hotel in the capital, for around £400m.
The hotel is the star asset in a £1bn portfolio that Apollo Global Management acquired this summer from LRG Acquisition, a consortium of Canada’s Realstar Group, Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC and Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners.
Queensgate, a partnership between Jason Kow and multi-family office LJ Group, has now bought the hotel from Apollo in a back-to-back deal that is one of its biggest to date. The private real estate manager advises and manages about £1.2bn of assets, excluding the new acquisition.
The hotel, which is new Gloucester Road underground station in west London, spans 500,000 sq ft and has 906 rooms.
It is expected to benefit from Capital & Countries’ £1.3bn regeneration of Earls Court, which will deliver 7,500 homes, a primary school, a leisure centre, health facilities, community and cultural spaces and 37 acres of green open space.
Earlier this year, Queensgate completed the development of the 18-storey 450-bed O2 Intercontinental hotel and Conference Centre on the Greenwich Peninsula. The conference centre has been touted as the largest in Europe.
Other top assets in Apollo’s £1bn hotel portfolio include serveral central London hotels, including Holiday Inn Mayfair and Holiday Inn Regents Park. The portfolio comprises of 22 Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotels, totalling 59,000 rooms, and has an estimated turnover of around £200m.
Apollo bought the portfolio under a franchise agreement after an original management deal with InterContinental Hotels Group expired at the end of 2014. Redefine Hotels were later appointed to manage the assets.
Before that, LRG bought the hotels as part of a 73-asset portfolio from InterContinental Hotels Group in 2005 for £1bn.
All parties declined to comment.