Many of our clients and customers have been inquirying as to our view of the likley activity for the upcoming year of 2012. We are starting the year with a great deal more business than the previous three years and feel that this will continue well into the year. The year 2011 was fairly active with some good arms length transactions including the Howard Johnsons Hotel in South Portland Maine and the Anchorage Hotel at the traffice cicle in Portsmouth, NH. We have also been involved in a number of bank owned transactions and some short sales. Slowly we are seeing the troubled hotel assets sold or converted to other uses and hopefully the transaction market will get back to normal in the near term. There are definetly buyers looking for good properties or looking for good opportunites.

Financing is availabe and interestingly capitalization rates have not changed much over the past few years. The main reason for that being the low interest rates available for financing thus allowing yields to remain favorable. Of course, the cash flows from most properties are not as strong as they were three years ago and although the Capitalization rates have remained the same values have been reduced. For all these reasons it is actually quite a good time to buy and not a bad time to sell as long as theinterest rates stay low and the capital gains rate remains, which may not be the case in 2013.

For those thinking of selling some time in the next 1 to 3 years we suggest you talk with us now, we can usually make suggestions to help get the best price and terms when the time does come to sell.