Newmark Group, Inc. today announced the expansion of its Lodging Capital Markets Group with two new hires and the relocation of two Newmark professionals. With these moves, the Group has established three new locations in California, South Florida and Texas. The new hires include Nick Pappas, a Senior Managing Director based in Los Angeles and Parker Sherrill, a Director based in Dallas. Lawrence Wolfe, one of four co-heads of Newmark’s Lodging Capital Markets Group, is relocating to Miami from New York City and Director Greg Morgan is relocating to Los Angeles from Washington, D.C.

With approximately $4.5 billion of hotel transactions currently under contract or in the market, this geographic expansion will further cement Newmark’s Lodging Capital Markets Group as one of the leading platforms nationally. The company’s recent transactions include arranging the sale of the Potomac Yards hotels in Washington, D.C.; the financing of the Edition West Hollywood and the recapitalization of the Graduate Hotel platform. The impressive collective career resume of Newmark’s hospitality professionals includes more than $250 billion of transactions, including some of the most high-profile lodging deals ever completed, such as the sales of the Waldorf Astoria and Baccarat Hotel in New York, Miami Beach’s Setai Hotel and Four Seasons Washington, D.C.; as well as the recapitalization of Kiawah Island Resort and the financing of the London West Hollywood. The Group focuses on all lodging and leisure capital markets transactions, including sales, joint ventures and financings.

“As ‘drive-to’ leisure destinations throughout the U.S. are already seeing increasingly strong demand, the hospitality industry’s recovery is expected to be fueled by the return of group and corporate travel as well as international tourism in 2022,” said Adam Etra, Vice Chairman, Co-Founder and Co-Head of Newmark’s Lodging Capital Markets Group. “We are thrilled to announce the continued expansion of Newmark’s lodging capital markets platform. We have always been active in the southeast and Texas and on the West Coast, and we believe those three regions will be among the most active markets in our business over the next several years.”

Pappas joins Newmark from Canyon Partners and will team with director Greg Morgan in the Los Angeles office. The two will focus on California, the Pacific Northwest and the Mountain Region. Sherrill, who joins Newmark from JLL (and previously HFF), will focus on Texas and the Southwest Region. Wolfe, who helped originally establish Newmark’s lodging business with Etra, Mark Schoenholtz and Miles Spencer in 2018, will focus on Florida and the Southeast, while continuing to work on the platform’s high-profile transactions throughout the country.

With new locations in California, South Florida and Texas, the Lodging Capital Markets Group will further entrench themselves in some of the highest-performing and most pandemic-resilient markets. Newmark’s expansion covers four of the five markets with the highest year-to-date revenue per available room (RevPAR) – Miami, Tampa, San Diego, and Los Angeles, according to STR. Additionally, the Pacific Region has had the highest RevPAR in the country over the past two years, according to STR. Economic fundamentals and demographics also continue to outpace those of other regions – eight of the top ten metropolitan regions with the largest increase in construction employment were in the Western U.S. or Florida, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and numerous cities throughout the West and Florida have some of the fastest growing populations.