Shayher Group closes in on $200m acquisition of Melbourne’s Park Hyatt hotel

Melbourne’s Park Hyatt Hotel is close to being sold for $200m in the largest commercial deal in the city in 12 months.

Shayher Group, part of apartment developer Par Jar Group, is close to purchasing Melbourne’s Park Hyatt hotel. Picture: NewsWire/ David Crosling

Melbourne’s Park Hyatt Hotel is close to being sold for $200m in the largest commercial deal in the city in 12 months, as a giant Taiwanese apartment developer looks to bulk up its Australian hospitality portfolio.

Shayher Group, part of apartment developer Par Jar Group, is close to purchasing the city’s Park Hyatt hotel, adding to its portfolio of large Australian hospitality assets including Brisbane’s best hotel, W, a 32-level five-star 312-room hotel in the city centre.

Shayher Group is looking to pay around $200m, the asking price, for the Park Hyatt, which hit the market six months ago, buying it from a Chinese group.

The Melbourne deal was negotiated by JLL Hotels & Hospitality managing director Peter Harper who declined to comment. It is understood the deal is yet to exchange.

Park Hyatt’s vendor Fu Wah International, which has hotels across the Asia Pacific region, including the five-star Park Hyatt Auckland, bought the Park Hyatt Melbourne hotel for about $140m roughly 10 years ago.

The Park Hyatt’s presidential suites.

The sales campaign for the hotel comes as Melbourne’s hotel market battles reduced occupancies, a large development book, and below-par average daily room rates.

“There is … still several years in Melbourne’s recovery arc,” the recently released Dransfield Hotel Futures Report said.

Recent STR research shows that Melbourne’s hotel rate growth was negative 3.3 per cent in the 2024 financial year, compared with Sydney’s hotels, which recorded nearly 4 per cent increases, while Perth recorded a 3.2 per cent growth over the same time frame.

However, according to Accor, the nation’s largest hotelier, Victorian hotels are showing

39 per cent growth year-on-year. Melbourne hotels are enjoying an autumn renaissance with 41 per cent growth in bookings, driven by events such as the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and a series of high-profile AFL matches, making the Victorian capital popular over the Easter holiday period, Accor said.

But according to the Dransfield report, Melbourne is having to absorb “significant and prolonged supply additions”.

Taiwanese group Shayher also own Brisbane’s W Hotel.

Melbourne’s current supply wave will take another two years to complete, it states.

Occupancies in Melbourne hotels average about 70 per cent, while in Sydney, average hotel occupancies top 80 per cent.

In 2016, Fu Wah constructed the Park Hyatt Auckland, at a cost of NZ$200m, which at the time was billed as China’s biggest ever investment in New Zealand’s tourism infrastructure. But sources said the construction of the 195-room hotel was beset by cost blowouts.

Originally published as Shayher Group closes in on $200m acquisition of Melbourne’s Park Hyatt hotel