US: WhyHotel, a service that operates pop-up hotels in new-build apartment buildings, has opened a second office, in San Francisco and launched a new business arm.
Led by the recently appointed SVP of acquisitions and development, Will Hu, Hospitality Living will be dedicated to building high-rise urban developments that bring the WhyHotel pop-up model into buildings on a permanent basis. In addition to Hu, WhyHotel has hired Miguel Oliveira as chief marketing officer, and Rohit Anand as experience visioneer.
The launch of Hospitality Living expands WhyHotel’s corporate footprint, with its first satellite office, on the West Coast. With a focus on building design, Hospitality Living will “deliver an unmatched guest experience, while creating an unprecedented flexible-use asset class that can optimise between apartment and hospitality use”. Both short-term guests and long-term residents will be able to benefit from the amenity platform that will be available across all of WhyHotel’s assets under management. The company is targeting 2022 for the first delivery of Hospitality Living assets.
“Since the 90s, what the real estate development community has affectionately called ‘mixed use’ properties are in reality inflexible, ‘stacked use’ assets. Every space is separate and built for a single use,” said Jason Fudin, CEO of WhyHotel. “At WhyHotel, we launched our pop-up product in 2017 to start to break down these silos. Our pop-up hotels bring flexibility to multifamily developments by creating synergies between hospitality and home. The launch of Hospitality Living will allow us to focus on the next phase of our company, the evolution of buildings into truly flexible assets. These high-rise projects will be built from the ground up and designed, entitled, and constructed to flex between uses, continuing to blur the lines between hospitality, home, work, and play.”</p
