According to The Dallas Morning News, Dallas is a staging area for a new hospitality business model trying to build hotel brands within existing apartment and condo buildings. Firms like "The Guild," based in Austin, sign leases for blocks of rooms within apartment buildings. They add upscale furniture, stock the fridge with food and then rent the spaces out by the night, while paying the hotel occupancy tax. The Dallas market already has a ready supply of hotel space and the outcome of added competition is uncertain. "All is well in the hotel industry and with these new competitors we haven't seen their impact yet," said Jan Freitag, senior vice president with travel research firm STR. "If you're in a high new-supply market, you've already got a lot of competition. This just adds fuel to the fire."
Austin's The Guild is run by co-founders and co-CEOs Chris Herndon, founder of the online rental app Apartment List, and Brian Carrico, an operator and developer of independent hotels and resorts. Since December, The Guild has been quietly converting and renting out rooms in two Uptown apartment buildings -- the 1909-era Magnolia Station near the American Airlines Center and Amli Quadrangle on Howell Street.
The company has 56 Dallas rooms so far. Most are in Amli, which has a multi-city deal with The Guild. Amli's portfolio includes 20,000 apartments in Dallas and eight other U.S. markets, including Austin, Chicago, Houston, Southern California and southeast Florida. Officials with Amli and Magnolia Station could not be reached for comment.
Read More
