Dive Brief:
- Skanska USA announced it has signed a $153 million construction management contract with Eighth and Demonbreun Hotel for a 33-story, 533-room JW Marriott hotel in Nashville, TN.
- The more than 800,000-square-foot hotel will feature almost 38,000 square feet of meeting and ballroom space, multiple food and beverage venues — including a 200-seat restaurant on the roof — and an underground parking garage.
- Construction on the hotel began last month, and Skanska expects work to wrap up by June 2018.
Dive Insight
The U.S. currently has more hotel projects under construction or in the planning stages than any other country in the world, according to a recent Lodging Econometrics report. Nationwide, in the first quarter of 2016, 4,471 hotel projects, representing 551,965 rooms, were either under construction or on the way, which was 40% and 29% of the world's hotel activity respectively. New York City was the busiest metro for hotels with 32,136 rooms, or 187 projects.
Upscale hotels made up 31% of the U.S. hotel construction market, and Marriott-brand hotels represented one-third of that figure. In fact, in four out of five of the hottest American hotel markets — New York City, Houston, Los Angeles and Nashville — Marriott hotels represented the majority of projects.
U.S. hotel construction has grown in comparison to its early 2016 activity, which was 865 hotel projects (103,230 rooms) at the start of the year, according to hotel research firm STR. In addition, the Dodge 2016 Construction Outlook report projected a 4% rise in U.S. hotel construction starts for the year.
Earlier this year, Skanska was awarded a $38 million contract to convert an eight-story, 72,000-square-foot historic San Francisco building into a nine-story "microhotel" with 170-square-foot guest rooms. And in November of last year, the company won a $56 million contract to build the 16-story, 229-room Hilton-brand luxury Porter Hotel in downtown Portland, OR.