412,878 Hotel Rooms Under Contract in U.S.A.

According to the December 2014 STR Pipeline Report, there are 3,443 hotels totaling 412,878 rooms Under Contract in the United States.

This represents a 14.3% increase in the number of rooms Under Contract compared with December 2013 and a 31.4% increase in rooms in the In Construction phase.

The Under Contract data includes projects in the In Construction, Final Planning and Planning stages but does not include projects in the Unconfirmed stage.

Among the Top 25 markets, New York, New York, reported the most rooms Under Contract with 27,009 rooms. Others rounding out the top five markets for rooms Under Contract include: Houston, Texas (16,473 rooms); Las Vegas, Nevada (12,278 rooms); Washington, D.C. (11,623 rooms); and Dallas, Texas (10,028 rooms).

New York has the largest number of rooms under construction (13,200 rooms), followed by Houston, which has 5,134 rooms under construction. Three other markets reported more than 3,000 rooms under construction: Washington, D.C. (3,440 rooms); Miami-Hialeah, Florida (3,425 rooms); and Chicago, Illinois (3,102 rooms). Markets with more than 2,000 rooms under construction include: Los Angeles-Long Beach, California (2,777 rooms); Seattle, Washington (2,266 rooms); and San Diego, California (2,195 rooms).

“The continued tailwind of a recovering U.S. economy has supported strong (revenue-per-available-room) growth across the nation,” said Jan Freitag, senior VP of strategic development for STR, Inc. “As national and regional occupancy has increased, more developers are finding hotel real estate attractive again, and we are seeing a healthy and unabated increase in new development, mostly in the limited-service sectors ... A few cities will feel the brunt of the construction, and it will be interesting to note how hoteliers will react in 2016 as these new hotels open.”