The largest hotelier in the south of Gran Canaria Hotel Investment Partners, owned by the related company HIP History Hotels, of the fund controlled by Blackstone, continues its commitment to the destination due to the availability of good purchases in an environment of high interest rates in which Companies need to strategically sell some assets into others to retain others. The fund will continue to support the south of Gran Canaria where it owns complexes such as the former IFA Hotels (less Faro de Maspalomas) or the Barceló Margaritas in Playa del Inglés, among others.
The CEO of Blackstone, Peter Werhahn, follows operations in the Canary Islands very closely given that the south of Gran Canaria, for example, is the most active area worldwide for the company in terms of the deployment of real estate capital, although he maintains the focus on his markets. main markets, it is also exploring emerging markets in southeastern Europe, such as Croatia. The fund's philosophy of supporting the destination Maspalomas, Playa del Inglés and San Agustín has received much more attention lately as a natural extension of the trends that have been awakening among the financial sector. Looking ahead, Blackstone remains confident in the Gran Canaria hotel sector and is prepared for further growth, maintaining a strategic focus on both emerging and established markets.
Last January Blackstone claimed that its presence does not respond to a speculative nature, but rather an investor, defending that it has been investing in the country for 10 years. Fernando Bautista, general director at Blackstone, defended at a real estate conference organized by IESE that its companies in Spain employ 8.000 people directly, with the real estate sector concentrating 1.200 of those employees. "In the end, we have been investing in this country for more than 10 years, both in real estate and in infrastructure or other sectors within the businesses we do. We are not a speculative fund, because we have been there for more than 10 years, we are an investment fund," he said. .
Bautista said that Spain is an "important" country for the fund and that, in the last two years, they have been working to continue increasing their presence in their logistics and hotel portfolio, so it is a market in which there is no question for them, with Spain concentrating 3% of the assets that its real estate division has throughout the world.
