REAL ESTATE : County Could Handle Far More Fancy Resort Hotel Rooms, Consultant Says

Based on the vast numbers of tourists that Orange County attracts, hoteliers could build and keep filled far more fancy resort hotels than have been built here already.

That’s the word from a local real estate consulting firm, which says the county could see a tenfold increase in fancy resort hotel rooms over the next decade. That estimate is based on the large numbers of such rooms in other Western tourist markets.

That’s a lot of rooms, especially when you consider that consultant Kenneth Leventhal & Co. counted four resort hotels in the county already with 1,750 upscale hotel rooms. Those resorts are the Ritz-Carlton, the Dana Point Resort, the Newporter Hyatt Newporter and the Marriott NewportNewport Beach Marriott Hotel and Tennis Club.

Where will the 15,000 other rooms go? Well, the consultant counts nine more hotels in planning or construction stages, accounting for 4,700 rooms. All of them are along the coast, from Huntington Beach (four hotels planned) to the Irvine coast between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach (three hotels) to Dana Point (two, maybe three, hotels planned).

If the forecast is correct, though, that still leaves 10,000 rooms. Kenneth Leventhal partner Gary T. Wescombe says he doubts that many more hotels will be built on the coast since most of the choice spots have been taken.

Rather, he speculates, most of these new rooms will go in new inland resorts, perhaps around the posh Coto de Caza neighborhood that’s popular with the county’s horsy set. Or they could go in small South County towns just inland from the beach like San Juan Capistrano.

“Those places have the room for more hotel development,” he said.

According to Leventhal, Orange County has become one of the busiest vacation spots in the nation. It also draws a lot of business people. Conventions alone brought 1 million people and $1.4 billion in spending to the county last year, according to the Convention and Visitor Bureau, which estimates half that amount went for hotel rooms.

Tourism brought in nearly 35 million people last year who spent an additional $5.2 billion. A quarter of that went for hotel rooms.

Some people are skeptical that the county can support many more lavish, expensive resorts, including some other real estate consultants. The county’s residents, they say, have already seen the quality of life deteriorate with the increase in smog, traffic and the paving of mile after mile of open space. Disneyland will always draw visitors, they concede, but why would people in their right mind have another reason to want to spend a lot of money to vacation here?

Leventhal, however, points to the success of the county’s single five-star resort hotel, the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point. And Los Angeles County, the consultant notes, has no five-star resort hotel. So the market, it appears, is now wide open.