From left: Renderings of Intercontinental’s hotel at 300 Schermerhorn Street and Toll Brothers and Starwood’s hotel at Pier 1 in Brooklyn
Builders are pursuing more hotel projects in Brooklyn this year than in 2012, in spite of a lackluster hotel market in the borough, according to figures by hotel data-crunching firm Smith Travel Research.
There are 22 new hotel projects with 2,208 rooms currently in the works in the borough of Kings, up from 14 projects and 1,370 rooms last year, according to the New York Observer.
The hoteliers are big-name groups inlcuding U.K.-based InterContinental Hotels Group, which is erecting two hotels in Downtown Brooklyn, and the Toll Brothers and Starwood Capital, which have joined forces to build 193 rooms of luxury lodging in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
At the same time, the Brooklyn hotel occupancy rate dropped more than ten percent last month from January of 2013 to just over 66 percent, according to STR data reported by the Obeserver. However the senior vice president of STR, Jan Freitag, told the Observer not to take the drop too seriously, calling the decline a “one-time outlier” because the comparison is made with 2013′s inflated occupancy rates after Hurricane Sandy. [NYO] – Angela Hunt