Anaheim Marriott Acquired by Tarsadia Hotels

Hotelier Tushar Patel purchased the Anaheim Marriott Hotel for about $80 million Thursday, solidifying his place as a major player in the city’s lodging business.

The deal for the 1,033-room convention-business hotel is the biggest yet for Patel’s Tarsadia Hotels, a family-owned, Costa Mesa-based concern that has a 25-year history in the Anaheim area.

The purchase, first reported in The Times a month ago, is one of several moves in the area by Tarsadia as it positions itself to take advantage of a wave of business from a new Walt Disney Co. theme park and an expanded Convention Center.

Tarsadia is building Westin and Sheraton hotels on the Katella Boulevard site of the old Jolly Roger Hotel, and it owns a separate 5-acre site fronting Katella where the city has approved 700 more hotel rooms.

It recently bought the Hyatt Regency Alicante in Garden Grove, a few blocks from Disneyland and the Convention Center, along with an adjacent office building it is turning into an all-suites hotel.

With completion of the Marriott deal, the company will own about 2,000 Anaheim hotel rooms and is developing 1,000 others. The total Anaheim market is about 20,000 rooms, said Greg Casserly, Tarsadia’s president.

“Market share is our game,” he said, noting that Tarsadia has a similar hotel cluster in San Diego, with six facilities and 1,200 rooms. Having several properties increases the efficiency of management, purchasing and marketing.

Tarsadia purchased the Marriott from a partnership led by Lend Lease Corp., an Australian company that acquired the hotel a few years ago when it bought Equitable Real Estate. The facility will continue to be managed by Marriott International under a long-term contract.

The Marriott sits just off Harbor Boulevard, clustered with the Hilton Anaheim and Towers--the city’s other major convention hotel--and the Convention Center addition that is being built.

“The Marriott is clearly one of the top three hotels in the whole Disneyland-Anaheim area,” said longtime area hotel broker Donald Wise, president of Wise Hotel Investments in Corona del Mar. “The Disneyland Hotel is ground zero, followed by Hilton and Marriott.”

Wise noted that the heavy construction in the area has scared off some business traffic in the hotels, “but this too shall pass. Once the current construction abates, the entire Anaheim market around Disneyland should effectively have quite a jump start.”