IRVING, TX FelCor Lodging Trust recently announced that it would acquire the lessee interests on 88 of its hotels from Bass Hotels & Resorts in a transaction slated to close July 1.
According to Tom Corcoran, FelCor s president/CEO, following the close of the Bass transaction, the company will have acquired all of its leases and will assume a hold position to wait out the economic slowdown facing the U.S. economy. The move to acquire all of its leases was a result of the REIT Modernization Act, which took affect January 2001.
Right now we re in a fairly slow period with the economy going through a softening. Overall, acquisitions and activity have slowed down and there is mounting concern about RevPAR growth [or lack thereof], said Corcoran.
The basic message is that we are continuing to asset manage our hotels, trying to improve revenues and cut expenses during the current soft economic situation. We re minding the store and paying attention to running our business as efficiently as possible, Corcoran added.
A recent project undertaken by the company involved the posting of its 2000 Annual Report to its website. According to Corcoran, the project was initiated in September 2000 and took three or four months of brainstorming.
The end result is that FelCor s Annual Report, aside from the usual facts and figures, includes illustrations of Corcoran himself and profiles of the company s most successful properties. To add to its uniqueness, the report has a name Follow Us To FelCor! and is designed in a map format.
The format we used for the annual report was done because most people throw away these reports and don t really read them. We tried to come up with something that people would pay attention to, said Corcoran. (4/19/01) Kelly Wayne