Mumbai: Global hospitality consulting firm HVS has tied up with real estate brokerage firm Anarock Property Consultants, five months after the US-based firm broke ties with its earlier Indian partner of 20 years.
The new joint venture firm HVS Anarock would provide consulting and advisory services to hotel firms to tap into India’s $210 billion hospitality market, said Anuj Puri, chairman of the new entity. The JV would also focus on brokerage, feasibility studies, operator searches, appraisals and executive searches to help find professionals in the hospitality sector.
While Shobhit Agarwal, the current managing director and chief executive officer (CEO) of Anarock, will head the transactions vertical at HVS Anarock, a new CEO of the JV firm would be announced soon.
“We think the market is right for hotel buy and sell. For many years, there was a mismatch in the expectations between the buyer and seller. This has narrowed down,” Puri said.
Secondly as the Indian economy starts doing well, hospitality as a business has also started improving and hotels have come up after many years. That has given opportunity to do management contracts, buyouts and valuations, he added.
The partnership also marks the entry of Anarock into the hospitality segment. For HVS, this is the second joint venture with an Indian firm after its fallout with its 20-year partnership with hotel veteran Manav Thadani. In December last year, Thadani announced that both the parties have mutually terminated their JV to start his own hotel consultancy firm Hotelivate. Through the partnership, Thadani had started HVS India operations in 1997.
“HVS is a big name..they have an established presence in India and have been a number one consultant on the hospitality side. Once we studied that this opportunity has opened up we were very keen to tie with them as that’s a space we want to be in,” Puri added.
HVS India has had more than two decades of exposure in the country, and we anticipate the partnership will leverage Anarock’s proprietary real estate funding platform to increase HVS India’s revenues by up to 75% over the next two years, said Stephen Rushmore Jr, president and CEO - HVS, in a statement.
“Together we foresee rapid expansion in the region and will be able to tap into more resources to serve our clients better than ever. India has always been an exciting market for us, and we are targeting a concentric outward growth into the hottest South Asian markets from here,” Rushmore Jr said.