It’s been about six weeks since he signed the contract, and Machete Group Founder and Principal David Carlock is still feeling the high that comes with clinching a major deal.
He and his development partners at JMA Ventures will bring a Kimpton hotel to the Westcourt mixed-use project in downtown Orlando.
“We have a pretty strong point of view for these kinds of projects, which are tightly integrated and fairly large-scale placemaking," Carlock told Orlando Business Journal.
Rising near downtown Orlando's Kia Center — home of the Orlando Magic, who are minority shareholders for Westcourt — this will be JMA Ventures’ second Kimpton Hotels & Resorts project adjacent an arena. The first is the Kimpton Sawyer Hotel at Downtown Commons in Sacramento.
“It has completely reset the upscale category in Sacramento on ADR (average daily rate) and RevPAR (revenue per available room),” said Carlock. “They've just been really killing it.”
The hotel will have 261 rooms spread over 11-stories, 16,000-plus square feet of meeting space, a full-service restaurant, lobby bar, cafe, pool, pool bar and pool lounge.
A newly released rendering shows Kimpton branding on a building that in previous images was generic.
The hotel pool will be on level three, sitting on top of the hotel lobby and overlooking Church Street, said Carlock. He credits Kimpton with being especially good at poolside experiences, which promise to be a draw year-round in Orlando.
Paul Sexton, managing director of hospitality real estate advisory firm HREC Orlando, noted that the Orlando market has been somewhat slow to embrace the development of boutique hotels.
“The late Bill Kimpton is often credited with starting the boutique hotel segment back in the 1980s,” he said, “and it’s taken Orlando that long to open a Kimpton here.”
Regarding potential success for the forthcoming hotel, Sexton said, “Every new hotel that gets built downtown does really well.”
Kimpton Hotels & Resorts are under the umbrella of Dublin-based IHG Hotels & Resorts.
The Westcourt project has been in the making since 2011 when the city of Orlando approved a feasibility study for a sports and entertainment district project.
Most of the project’s land was purchased in 2013 by an entity associated with the Orlando Magic and the property’s first demolition was in 2016.
By 2023, the Orlando Magic enlisted San Francisco-based JMA Ventures LLC and Houston-based Machete Group as developers and co-financiers for what was then called the Sports + Entertainment District. The project now stands at 8.5 acres.
In April of this year, the project’s new name, Westcourt, was released. The price tag for the 900,000-square-foot phase one has climbed to $500 million.
